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.