Let’s get this out of the way immediately :

Editor’s Note : This is the second version of this blog post because SOMEHOW, pressing Ctrl-Z to Undo deleted everything in the post except that first sentence, and I could not undo the undo, and so that was kaputski. So I apologize if I come across as a tad snippy tonight. It’s because I am pissed off solid about something that has nothing to do with you, my dear and gentle readers.

Don’t worry. This is not going to be another of my “getting there” posts.

That’s still a problem (and I am so sick of only getting halfway there, I can tell ya) but that;s not what I will be talking about tonight.

The big news is : I sort of have a freelance writing gig!

It’s kinda complicated.

See, I was on Upwork (love that site) and I came across this gig for someone to write stories in a generic internet chat style. Like this :

<PersonA> Hello fellow fictional character!
<PersonB> I return your friendly greeting heartily!
<PersonA> Class went well today!
<PersonB> Oh? What class did you have that you are taking?
<PersonA> Writing Naturalistic Dialogue!

You get the idea. (For some reason, I was hearing that dialogue in the voices of Rocky and Bullwinkle in my head. )

That sounded like a super fun gig, so I applied for it. And I decided that I would pull out all the stops and submit my bid in the form above.

But I had neither the time nor the proper frame of mind to write something serious, compelling, and well thought out. So instead, I was my usual goofy ass self, and wrote a little something that goes exactly like this :

Okay, so it’s a tad past eleven. I blame traffic.

In my case, the frizzies in question are mental, not… follicular. Now is the sensible time to be blogging as I will be out this evening, but right now all I want to do is go back to sleep.

I am slowly learning to take that philosophically. I am doing my best to find a middle ground between my need for a greater quantity of sleep due to its low quality, and the cowardly impulse to sleep in order to escape reality and all its complications and issues.

Right now, I am suffering through one of my fits of indecision. There are so many things I could be doing right now that it’s making it hard for me to choose the one I should be doing and just do it. I feel trapped at the crossroads of infinity and it makes me anxious.

But I will work my way through it. After all, this is an extremely familiar problem that I guarantee I will face many more times in the future and so it’s a problem worth going through some Hell to fix.

I just need to work through the anxiety to the point where emotion is no longer getting in the way of sensible decision making and prioritization. And when that happens, the solution will fall into place and it will be so simple and obvious that I will wonder what all the fuss was about.

It’s happened before and it will happen again. The trick is to make sure it happens before it’s too late to do anything about it.

Waiting for failure and inaction to resolve the tension and release the anxiety is most definitely a maladaptive coping strategy.

Hmmm. Perhaps that kind of relief is part of what makes depression so hard to treat. The patient is addicted to that feeling of relief of tension. That’s the unseen motivator of a lot of “failure” coping strategies. Doing something right takes time, attention, and focus, and those extend the time in that painful panicky anxious state far too long. Whereas failure is instant relief, and even when it doesn’t get you out of the situation immediately, you don’t care because when you stop trying, there’s no more fear of failure.

It’s a very strange kind of emotional alchemy, but it’s what goes on in the mind of us broken people. Strong emotion usurps our reason and causes us to make short-sighted choices just to relieve the unpleasant emotion.

The irony being that the root cause of the problem might well be an over-rational mindset that filters out emotional impulses and acts only on what it thinks is reason.

Emotional needs get ignored in favour of mental stimulation and things go all to hell inside the person’s psyche. In response : further suppression of emotion, further dependence on the “cold circuit” intellectual pleasures, and that swamp gets even deeper.

And all because someone never learned to deal with their emotions properly.

Well, and massive emotional trauma.

Wounded birds don’t fly.

Tonight, I will be meeting with Felicity and Garth about our Paragon project. It’s a wacky show about the world’s cheapest paranormal detective agency. They deal with the cases that are too weird, too unglamorous, or just plain too stupid for the other agencies to deal with. It’s a sci fi comedy that we have been developing for ages.

Now that I am no longer a VFS student, I have time to develop it further with my friends. Hopefully, I will write some short, simple scripts for 30 second-ish bits we can put online soon. Some little snippets that we can pull off without much in the way of complicated equipment or tricky editing.

Just some smart, funny people, and our cameras.

I just realized : there’s no such thing as a digital camera any more. They’re all digital. Film cameras have gone the way of the Victrola. I am sure there are hipsters taking snapshots with “vintage” Polaroids out there, but for the most part, film’s not even a thing any more.

So that;s another technology that has died in my lifetime. That’s one of the perils of being an old nerd, I suppose. You’ve lived long enough to see what you think of as “technology” to get supplanted by the new hotness.

Not that I have anything against the new hotness. If I think it’s better, I will adopt it. It might take me a while to do it, but I will do it eventually. I

In my defense, I have always been like that. You would not believe how hard I resisted using Windows 3.1 back in the days of DOS. I liked my command line interface, and had gotten pretty good with it. Compared to that, using some stupid thing with pictures that you need to use the mouse to use seemed clunky and absurd.

And vaguely insulting too, now that I think of it. Like I needed pretty pictures and a point and click interface to use my computer!

I guess that’s how the Linux users feel.

In fact, at that time, I resented having to use the mouse for anything. Even video games. Not sure how long that lasted, but I know it ended when I used mouse + keyboard for an FPS game and realized how much easier that made things.

So what I am saying is that I have always been stubborn, resistant to change, and contrarian. I don’t like feeling like I am supposed to be using the new thing, and often only adopt it once everyone else has done it and therefore the herd has cleared.

And yeah, I know that;s kind of anti-social of me. But that’s okay. There is nothing wrong with knowing you are not the most outgoing person in the world and that it’s okay to set limits that are perhaps stricter than the average person’s.

It’s the burden every Taurus bears, I think. We can be geniality itself, sharing our vast equanimity and making everyone feel comfortable and relaxed.

But when the party is over, seriously, get the fuck out.

We need our space back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first : on getting there.

Haven’t been back since that one time. Guess I am on an “every other week” schedule at the moment. Which is just plain not enough.

I continue to ponder involving others. There’s no shortage of horny gay dudes in the GVRD and at least a few of them must be into bears. Or at least horny enough not to care about how the person who helps them ejaculate looks.

But that would be a mindbogglingly huge step for me. Invite a stranger into my home and then make myself vulnerable by trying to initiate/be receptive to sexytimes?

As challenges to my social anxiety go, that’s a mammoth endeavour. Walking onto the Oscar stage naked would be less daunting.

In fact, that would be hella fun. A bad career move, probably, but I can guarantee one thing : after a stunt like that, everyone would know my name.

There is hope on the “getting there” front  my Paxil dose is being reduced. Hopefully this will lessen that god damned sexual side effect.

Anyhow, enough about my sex life and/or fantasies.

My back hurts. And not in the usual way either.

For those of you not in the know, near-constant back pain is one of the daily burdens of being obese, especially in men and especially especially tall fat men.

Short fat dudes have their own issues. And theirs are way more likely to be fatal.

TBFTGOGGI. (There But For The Grace Of God Go I).

That one probably won’t catch on.

Anyhow, I am used to the usual aches and pains that come with being me. But it’s gotten much worse lately. My back gets very stiff in seemingly random places and I don’t feel it until I get up and then I get really sharp pains radiating out from my pains.

Usually, when my back gets this bad, it’s because there is a slowdown in my solid waste disposal system and once that clears, my back relaxes and I feel better.

But this is centered between my shoulder blades, and that’s way too high up for it to be something happening in my lower intestine. Plus, the pains are sharp enough to make me cry out, and I’m at least partly a tight assed white dude who has trouble expressing emotion. so that’s really saying something.

And they occur all over my back, which also points to this not being a localized phenomenon. So it’s probably not just a bowel thing.

I won’t be sure until the next time I defecate, though.

It’s got me fairly worried. I don’t know, offhand, of a medical condition that would account for the symptoms, but there probably is one and it’s probably not good.

The stiffness is almost worse than the pains. The pains hurt like fuck but they are over fast. Just a needle stab of pain and then its gone.

But the stiffness is brutal. It feels like my back is a very rusty hinge being painfully forced to open, and when back pain runs that deep, it doesn’t just hurt, it feels wrong.

Like how a broken bone feels wrong. Bone pain freaks me out. For good reason!

If it does turn out to be a bowel thing, I have some exquisite relief coming when it finally passes. Trust me, there’s no high quite like the one that comes from pain turning into a massive relief of muscular tension backed by all those endorphins the pain has released.

It’s like suddenly, nirvana. All pain and tension gone. The world is a marvelous and magical place, and you feel sooooo good. And everything is just plain groovy.

So I have that to look forward too. If they could make a device that triggered that, like some little magnetic induction gizmo that stimulates a certain spot on your spine, it would do wonders for the health of the world.

And make the inventors crazy fucking rich, of course.

Had therapy today. Productive, in a non-psychological way. My therapist convinced me that I have been pushing myself too hard with the six to eight hours of job hunting a day. That is probably why I have been feeling worn down lately.

I suppose it was a tad unrealistic of me to think I can adopt a totally new lifestyle based on the big head of enthusiasm I had after graduating.

So I will cut back somewhat. But only in the sense of lowering the minimum. If I get bored as hell with video games and Internet bullshit to the point of wanting to scream, I will feel free to get some productive shit done.

Got to do something with all that energy!

Hopefully, the reduced dosage of Paxil will cut back on that goddamned sexual side effect too. As well as another problem which I have been dealing with, increased appetite.

And we are talking getting frantically hungry. As if I was starving to death and had to get calories RIGHT NOW or I would collapse and die.

It’s very irritating and stressful, and wears on my nerves. I don’t listen to the urgings, of course. I stopped eating between meals a long long time ago. So it’s not like I am in danger of getting way fatter.

It’s just that this crazy hunger is a bitch to ignore.

And it’s humiliating to realize I await every meal like someone waiting for their long absent lover to get home.

My shrink also gave me a free sample of a drug called Abilify. I am to use it if the reduced  Paxil dose makes my mood crash.

Technically, it’s listed as an “atypical antipsychotic”, which is beginning to seem to me like a catch all category for any drug that has an unusual and hence unlisted action.

Like how our vet called mutts “mixed terriers”.

Apparently, Abilify enhances the effect of some antidepressants. And it also helps reduce the side effects. So I am willing to give it a shot if I need to do so.

But after glancing at the Wikipedia page for it and seeing things like neuroleptic malignant syndrome and tardive dyskinesia amongst the side effects, I’m not eager.

Then again, if it could cure that goddamned sexual side effect….

Let’s just say I wouldn’t be the first guy to risk his health for the sake of getting off.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has been slightly sucky.

Mostly because I miscalculated regarding my supply of Wellbutrin and I ended up with only half my usual dose Sunday and none whatsoever today.

And Wellbutrin (or Bupropion to its friends) is my get up and go pill. It’s the marvelously magical pill that overcomes depression’s evil energy draining properties and gives me energy and focus and drive.

So I have not had a lot of that recently. No Wellbutrin, no energy. It’s always slightly humbling and/or humiliating to realize just how dependent you are on a chemical in order to function even at a low level.

And considering how bad I felt this afternoon, I have had my lesson  for what I hope is a very long time.

My recent Netflix viewage didn’t help. First, I watched Bee Movie.

Now I knew going in that nobody really liked the movie. That’s what made me curious about it in the first place. I wanted to see if it was as bad as both the critics and the box office said it was.

And yup, it’s pretty damn bad.

It lulled me into a false sense of complacency because the first half hour wasn’t too bad. There were a lot of cute bee jokes, like the main character Barry’s parents saying “You were always such a good student…. straight B’s every time!) and they established the idea that a bee gets one choice in their life : choosing the job they do in the wacky cartoon honey factory that is their hive. They will then do that job till the day they die.

Our hero Barry feels like that is wrong and doesn’t want to choose, so he goes out with the Pollen Jockey^[1]]s, aka the bees that actually leave the give to go get nectar for the hive, and gets to see the big beautiful world full of things he never imagined could exist and that even has colors other than yellow, brown, and black.

The hive has a very small palette.

Imagine my surprise, then, when in the second half hour of the flick ^[2], they completely abandon the plotline about him choosing a job in favour of a rather unsettling plot in which he falls in love with a human woman voiced uninspiringly by Renee Zellweger.

Now I am a furry and I may or may not have dabbled in trans-species love a time or two, so I am not normally one to frown upon relationships that cross the species (or in this case, phylum) barrier.

But he’s a freaking bee. An  insect. I mean ewww.

After making us all uncomfortable with that, the plot lurches into a third plotline where Barry the Bee discovers that humans are stealing the bee’s honey and selling it.

He then sues the human race to get the honey back. And wins. And then it lurches in a fourth direction and becomes about how all the flowers are dying because the bees don’t need to go collect nectar any more.

Each one of these plot lurches costs the movie a massive amount of credibility^[3] and plot momentum, not to mention likability.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The script is a terrible mishmash of ideas and overall the movie has a feeling of incoherence and by the end I just plain didn’t care enough for the ridiculous and clearly ill thought out ending to even both me.

That was lunch. With supper, I tried out Bill Nye’s new show, Bill Nye Saves The World. 

It stinks. On ice.

I really tried to like it. I really wanted to like it. I had been reluctant to try it because I knew damned well that last vestiges of my respect and love for Bill Nye were on the line. But today was the day I decided to give it a shot.

The show is just plain awful. The pacing is incredibly leaden. Segments end at arbitrary moments and there is no structure to the show at all. Nye constantly mugs in a way I am sure he thinks is funny, and the laugh track and/or well trained audience agrees. They laugh at a lot of things that aren’t even jokes, and that’s total comedy death for me.

Clearly, Nye has been inside the echo chamber of his “skeptic” fanbase for far too long and has no idea how he’s really coming across. The show is a real stinker that is made without skill or wit, and seems to be running on Nye’s nostalgia for the time when he was relevant and doing something interesting with his life, and nothing else.

And that’s frigging depressing.

I wonder if I could position myself as the pro-science anti-skeptic. The person with no ties to religion whatsoever who nevertheless stands up for the faithful when they are being bullied and abused by some goddamned troglodytes with neckbeards and fedoras who think that it’s fine for them to dole out the same kind of intolerance they have suffered from their whole lives because, unlike them, these people deserve it.

Absolutely fucking unacceptable. I am a humanist through and through, and that means I stick up for all victims of abuse, regardless of who is doing the abusing.

And I could fill this role because I am a person they cannot dismiss as some kind of religious nut or new age guru. I have a very strong scientific mind (stronger than a lot of scientists, to be honest) and a zest for argument bordering on the psychotic. I would love to take these Dawkinite assholes to task.

I would relish being a lightning rod for their hate.

I guess that’s kind of fucked up, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[

I still feel pretty tired.

And the thing is, I can’t just do the obvious thing and keep on sleeping till I am caught up.

Why not? because there is a symptom of depression knows as bed-seeking. and I have been a victim of it many times before.

Because, you see, depression makes people want to hide from the world, and being in bed under the covers is very soothing. And when even that is not enough, there is always sleep. Sleep is the closest thing you can get to being dead and thus immune to all of the scary things life brings.

Basically, to a depressive,  sleep is like suicide without the commitment.

And one’s depression is perfectly capable of manufacturing a false sleepiness to get to the desired goal of sleep. It works the same way a fat person’s food addiction convinces them that they are hungry when, in truth, their body’s needs are amply supplied and all that is really going on is that the mind craves the reward stimulus of food.

But that’s a story for another column.

The really weird thing is that if you go deep into bed seeking, it feeds on itself. You are tried because you haven’t been getting out of bed and getting any stimulation. This is how a depressive can end up staying in bed for days aside from getting up to use the bathroom and maybe grab a snack you can eat in bed.

I know all too well what it’s like to sleep, wake up, think about getting up and facing reality, and being filled with such fear and apprehension than I go back to sleep with a vengeance in order to hit that reality snooze button again.

Maybe that is why it bothers me so much when people say “I love sleep”. Dunno.

On the other hand, I know I have messed up sleep. It follows that I might have a genuine biological need for more sleep than a healthy person, at least part of the time.

And I have noticed something dangerous happening in me lately : moments where I just can’t remember why I do things at all. Total lack of directing force,. accompanied by a feeling of being utterly overwhelmed by life and a desire to flee deep within myself.

That’s clearly the voice of depression. And I am trying my best to listen and figure out what it is trying to tell me.

Other than “get your sleep apnea treated, you ninny!”.

I really wish there was such a thing as a drug that makes you focused and alert. But a relaxed and comfortable alertness, which performance science has known for decades is the state in which we are the most productive and effective. So not a stimulant like caffeine, which can help wakes us up and keep us alert but can also lead to feeling jittery, nervous, and even anxious.

If there was such a drug and I was pleased with my output while on it (and so were others, like say employers), I would become thoroughly and knowingly addicted to it.

Because productivity is the real high, at least for me.

It might be that I simply have to accept that my life runs on a long cycle of expansion and contraction, and that while things contract, I will need to find a way to let myself run down for a while without it wrecking my life and my ambitions.

I’ve long been a fan of surrendering to the inevitable. Perhaps too much of one, come to think of it. But I have always been aware of the dangers of ending up in a position where you are mindlessly struggling against a vastly superior force, like you are trying to fight the tide, instead of just learning to deal with it.

It can get bad enough to put you in the position of forgetting not just why you are fighting but that you’re fighting at all. It becomes instinct, as automatic as peristalsis. All that energy and effort (not always the same thing) wasted on a fight you would instantly recognize as an absurd and hopeless endeavour if you examined it consciously.

But of course, that all depends on your definition of “the inevitable”. And that’s a very slippery and dangerous definition for a depressive. Our depression gets very good at convincing us that action of any sort is futile and that we should just relax into the warm wet womb of despair and stop all that “trying to do things” business.

Maybe I should fall back on my old standby, desire over “need”. Sleep till I catch up and get bored with sleeping and want to do something fun. Work like hell until I am all out of energy. Play my video games till I get sick of them. Let true emotion guide me.

It’s a tough road for a hyper cerebral type like myself who is so used to going places with his mind first in order to make sure they are “safe” and making the rational “smart” choice without my emotions having much of a say in the matter.

And that can be a very powerful thing. There is an enormous advantage to being able to think rationally and make intelligent moves on the chessboard of life.

But no matter how good a strategist you are, you have emotional needs that must be met or you will fall apart inside, like any starving organism.

And you can’t meet those needs if you let the selfish ego lock the id out of the conscious mind all the time.

If that happens, you end up like me, not sure what I even want, let alone knowing how to get it. At some deep level, I have to let my emotions do the steering, and that scares the hell out of me.

Because how do I know my emotions can be trusted with the steering wheel? I’ve never trusted them before. When I try to imagine them doing the driving, all I can see is chaos and anarchy and insanity.

And maybe that would happen… at first.

But if the world and I survived…..

What brave new world would greet us?

Maybe it would be destruction and chaos, but maybe, just maybe…

From that anarchy would arise a living star.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.