Came across this marvelous song recently, and it got me thinking.

I love that song so much. It’s so full of hope and courage. It’s positive, but not in a rainbow farting reality denying hippie way. It’s a song that says “If we stand together before the night, we can make it through to dawn together. ”

That’s a kind of positive message that makes sense to me. Psychedelia never has. Don’t get me wrong – I am totally down with the whole groovy, free love, flower power vibe.

But I have never cared for the whole drug thing. The “better living through chemistry” thing. I wouldn’t deny anyone their bag or anything, but to me, it seems like it just turned a lot of people into mindless lotus-eaters who couldn’t handle reality and therefore had very little effect on it.

So to me, in a sense, the big crash after the big high that happened in the 1970’s was the best thing that could have happened to the Movement. It let people jettison the Cloud 9 con and get real. People had to leave Cloud Cuckoo Land, and that was a hell of a comedown for a lot of people. But it resulted in people having to come to grips with a lot of things that the hippie crowd just didn’t want to deal with, man.

Of course, I might be biased, because I was born in 1973. My life from birth to age 7 was in the 1970’s. I absorbed the decade on a cellular level, and anything from that era can trigger enormous waves of nostalgia in me.

It’s entirely involuntary. And not entirely unpleasant.

Not entirely pleasant either. For reasons that definitely come from Crazytown USA,. I mistrust nostalgia intensely.

For one thing, strong feelings of nostalgia give me a feeling that is too similar to one of my reality-shaking attacks of intense deja vu. I hate those. They make me so confused and I feel like I am going to loop back in time and lose everything I have gained in the intervening time, and have to live it all over again. I get dizzy and faint and nothing feels real, and that terrifies me to my core and shakes my sense of reality entirely.

And I hate that.

So there’s that. There is also the promise I made to myself while I was having a pretty shitty childhood that if I ever thought that this was the best time of my life, shoot me in the fucking head because it sucked.

And I haven’t changed my mind on that. I had a very bad childhood. Not as bad as some, but no kid should grow up as alone as I was. It’s a wonder that I came out as sane as I did. Such isolation and bullying often produces entirely unstable individuals.

Thank goodness for the entertainment industry And the stabilizing influence of a middle class upbringing. And being so god damned smart, I suppose.

The jury is still out on whether that was a good thing. On the one hand, having such a strong intellect is a huge asset when it comes to regulating your behaviour, and my extremely pragmatic mind anchored me to reality in so many ways.

On the other hand, being locked away in my ice castle did me a lot of harm, and kept out the warm emotions I needed so very badly. I am still thawing out from that. I might have been better off in the long run if I had been forced to deal with my emotions instead of freezing and studying them in order to try to make sense of the world.

Nietzsche was right when he talked about how life must be lived to be understood, instead of killed, stuffed, and studied like so many butterflies in someone’s collection.

Fascinating image, says my mind. Fuck off, Spock.

A name for part of my problem just popped into my head : detached id. The id is still there – it is our primal animal selves – but it has been disconnected from the core psyche by a retreat into pseudo-rationality in order to escape negative emotional realities.

This makes someone like me fundamentally unbalanced – polarized – by this flight from deep emotion. Nearly every deep drive is replaced by cold curiosity and frozen fascination. And they make very poor substitutes.

So what happens? The pain of this disconnection makes us retreat even further from our emotional selves and the problem gets worse and worse.

I’m on the path to recovery from this fundamental error. I can look behind me and see how far I have come from the frozen and fearful human wreckage that I was for two decades. I am far more connected than I used to be, and I am also a lot more confident.

Those two things are – not to be cute – connected.

But I can also look ahead and see how far I have to go. I am still pretty scared and fragile. I feel like I am still somewhat of a timid creature tiptoeing through life, ready to bolt and dive into his burrow at the slightest provocation. It will take some time and dedication and a concentrated effort of will to push myself into all the experiences it will take to lose the fragility, find my inner core of strength, and feel comfortable in my own skin.

And a lot of that will come from building my career as a freelancer. This weekend has shown me quite vividly how merely blogging could never be enough for me again. with no episode to write, I have way too much time on my hands and it becomes a burden, and I begin heading in the general direction of depression.

Even though I have a video game to play that I am thoroughly enjoying. It’s just not enough any more. It occupies my mind and makes the time go faster, but after a while the restlessness and dissatisfaction start creeping in and time becomes a burden.

The thing is, I have stuff I could and should be doing. I’m just not there yet. I am still stuck in the “work and play” mentality, where there are the things I have to do, and once that is done, it’s playtime.

The road out does not go in that direction. The two must become one.

Only then will I learn to truly be alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Cometh the night, on itth thadowy thlippers!

Or something like that.

Hi folks. After not blogging for four day, I feel like I was on a long lonely journey for that whole time and now I have come home and boy, have I missed you nice people!

I mean, you actually read what I write! Despite the very strange and sometimes extremely dark contents of my stressed and fractured  mind and my leaking them all over the electronic page in full view of the discerning public, you keep on reading, no matter where this journey of mine takes me.

And I am so very, very grateful for that.

That theme of something shameful in me needing to come out has been on my mind lately. A lot of victims of child sexual abuse have to cope with a lifetime of feeling dirty and gross and like we are some kind of horrible disgusting thing.

Violation does a lot more than merely upset us. Ask any rape victim. Regardless of the ages of the people involved, the violation of self – in both the body and the mind – leaves a terrible wound. It damages your sense of safety because it shatters your sense of control over what happens to you on the most intimate possible level.

There are some deep rules to society that we never experience consciously because they are so rarely violated. One of this most basic, yet most complex, is our sense of will – of permission. We live our lives, at least in the modern world, with the assumption that we are in control of our own destiny That people need permission to do certain things to us or with us. That even those with he most power over us will respect those boundaries because violating them simply is not done.

Rape is the most potent form of this violation because it centers around the most intimate thing people do, and that’s sex. Sex involves parts of our bodies that we cover up in public and about which we tend not to talk. Not only that, but if there’s someone else involved, it not only involves their most intimate body parts as well, but even in non-penetrative sex it involves some very intimate contact with said body parts.

And if the sex is penetrative, well…. that’s another person’s body entering your body’s most private area, whatever the orifice involved is. That’s the most intimate you can be with another human being outside of an operating room.

And even there, there’s rules.

Myself, I was violated when I was only three years old. Back then, in the Seventies, most people didn’t even know (or at least, acknowledge) that child sexual abuse was even a thing that happened. That even COULD happen.

This meant predatory pedophiles acted more or less with impunity.

I certainly wasn’t ever going to tell. I did not even have the words. And it would not have helped if I had. Odds are, it would have only made things worse, and I think I was better off without the additional trauma of having adults angrily telling me I was lying and just making up dirty things just to get attention because that kind of thing didn’t happen!

For my younger readers : people really thought like that in the bad old days. Seems crazy in this world where people are hyper-vigilant about pedophiles, but there was a time when pedophilia was so unthinkable to people that they refused to believe it existed at all.

And that meant punishing the victim. God, the past sucks.

The thing about my feeling like there is something horrible and shameful about me is that I lack the psychological apparatus of guilt to put it into a cultural context. I certainly never blamed myself for the incident. How could I? I was only three years old when it happened.

What could I possibly have done differently? Reasonably speaking?

And yet, that sense of being horrible on the inside persisted. I didn’t feel like I had sinned. I never even had the concept of sin taught to me. If something was wrong, it was because it hurt people, not because it violated a list of rules.

I’m pretty sure I was better off that way. I know for certain that I am better off without that whole “original sin” bullshit. I’m convinced that the whole concept of oiignal sin was invented by old priests worried about someone gaining power over them by “cheating” – that is to say, by actually not sinning.

But I digress.

I think my sense of something horrible, toxic, and shameful deep inside me stems from something more primal that religion or guilt or any of that crap. I think it stems from the fact that I was violated at an age when diapers were not that far behind me and I was learning the basics of how to do stuff like clean myself.

I know this because when I imagine all this stuff “coming out”, I feel exactly the kind of deep, deep shame that accompanies violation of toilet rules.

I trust that the Freudian overtones of “there’s something disgusting inside me and I have to get it out” do not need to be explicitly explained.

In those terms, I have been emotionally constipated for my whole life. This is not uncommon in British-derived cultures. Our display rules for emotions are extremely strict compared to other cultures like the French or the Spanish.

We keep it all locked away. All except that particular strain of lunatic known as “the writer”, who pushes that stuff out for the whole world to see then cries out “Love me for this!”.

Amazingly, it’s been known to work.

This subject surfaced in my mind when I tried to imagine my room being totally clean and neat and tidy. It sounds good on paper, but when I imagine it, I get this feeling like something dark and horrible and deeply shameful is rising up inside me and it’s going to COME OUT and that would be the WORST THING EVER.

And besides, if all my bad stuff came out all at once…. who would I be afterwards?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Phew! Finally got my tech issues sorted out. I have not been able to access my blog (the one you are reading right now, bless your heart) since last Monday due to a series of snafus combined with my signature mix of laziness and absentmindedness.

So first, I thought the problem was with my credit card. So I logged on to my credit card’s website. ZERO BALANCE? There should be $77 on that thing! OMG, I have been the victim of cybercrime! Who do I call? What do I do? No wonder my payment to Fatcow, my webhost, didn’t go through! I know, I’ll start a live chat with tech support! They probably have people for this kind of thing.

And it’s only once I had started the live chat that I realized I am on the website of my old VISA card, the one I got from Money Mart. D’oh!

So I log on to the RIGHT web site. There’s the money. So that’s not the issue. Then I notice on the card’s website that the status of my card is SUSPENDED.

Waddy fug? So then I have to call the tech support for my card and find out what THAT is all about. Turn out, it’s about their system suddenly flipping out because of an error it made when processing some admittedly slightly complicated stuff regarding my student loan.

For some no doubt completely legitimate and excruciatingly boring reason, they had to put the last part of my student loan into my bank account and then I had to pay that money to the school myself, and there was something about $1000 that would be temporarily one place but not really, and blah blah blah whatever.

The fact that I can understand that stuff without much problem if I try does not in any way make me more likely to try. I got other uses for my brain.

So that’s what the problem with my card was. The nice Quebecois fellow on the phone had to call me back like three hours later in order to have enough time to track down the problem and fix it.

And he had such a lovely accent, too. Definitely the educated Quebec accent, not the tabernaquino rural Quebec accent, which hurts my ears to listen to.

I suppose a lot of anglo-Canadians would have found his accent hard to understand, but due to my half-Acadian upbringing, I have like a +10 at least to my saving throw versus French Canadian accents.

To me, he sounded like one of the Acadian guys from the wrong side of the tracks from back home testifying in court. You know, carefully enunciating every word and using vocab that’s probably not the kind of words they use when talking with their buddies.

I, of course, found that very charming and cute.

Anyhow, after my new French crush called back, my credit card was cleared for action. I go to my blog – still a no go. Well, clearly the problem is that they tried to process my payment when my card was suspended. So I just have to contact their live chat and get them to process the payment again!

I do this, and they say I am all paid up. Wut? The Indian dude who I was live-chatting with told me the problem was that the “Something went wrong… ” screen was probably just stuck in Chrome’s cache and that clearing my cache would fix the problem. I thought that made sense, so I said goodbye and closed the chat window.

Then I looked up how to clear my cache. It was not exactly tricky. However, it took like ten minutes. I wiped everything but passwords.

No way am I deleting the passwords my browser knows, because for the most part, it’s the only thing that DOES know them. I sure as hell don’t.

After my browser finished its long dump, I tried to log on to my blog. Nope! Still not working. Argoaihsdiodhwoei’dhwed. So I do ANOTHER live chat to my web host.

This time, I tell the guy to look for problems with my account. He puts me on hold (so to speak) for around half an hour, then comes back and tells me that my account with FATCOW had been suspended due to a security issue that had let some bot somewhere post an ad on my blog.

Would have been nice if they had TOLD ME THAT. Oh well. Quite possibly they did and my whanging banging clanking monster beast of a mind lost it.

In other words, I forgot.

So he is nice enough, after a little scolding and telling me to put a CAPTCHA on my blog and update my plugins, he removed the suspension and voila, I could blog again.

And now I’m back! Did you miss me? I sure missed you! 🙂

I always miss blogging when I don’t get to do it, no matter how legitimate my reason for missing it is. It’s like a bodily need. It builds up no matter how good an excuse you have not to relieve it. Sooner or later, it demands release.

The whole deal was complicated by the sort of melted brain confusion and lethargy that I experience on summer afternoons. I can prevent it – or at least manage it – via aggressive hydration, but if I don’t get on that fast enough, I become too stupid and lazy to think of it.

Just one of life’s little complications, I suppose.

Plus I over-focus in the computer and ignore my body. In a very crude sense, it’s like a transcendent state of mind. The sort of thing that monks and other ascetics train their entire lives hoping to achieve – a state where the mind transcends the body and is thus freed of material concerns – and all I need is a decent video game.

Or a web browser and a blog.

Anyhow, that is the long and twisted tale of why I haven’t posted since last Monday. Everything is back to normal now, and there should be no further interruptions.

Thanks for reading me.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve just learned about this incident (pardon the primitiveness of the website) from an episode of that show I have been watching via Netflix, Portal to the Unknown. And it has got me thinking about a subject I have given a lot of thought over the years, and that’s skepticism. There are two kinds, one being a very important bulwark against delusion and illusions when attempting to figure out what is really going on, and the other a mere tissue-paper mask hiding the same old bloody minded ignorance and prejudice that has plagued human endeavour since the dawn of civilization.

Let’s talk about that second kind.

It’s a large part of what passes for public skepticism today. It’s based on a slew of preconceived notions about what the truth looks like, sounds like, and smells like. It substitutes logically meaningless emotional responses like a sense of absurdity or a vague idea of the “laws of physics” allow for actual scientific reasoning, and causes people to do commit the ultimate crime against reason, which is to ignore the evidence in the face of what one “already knows”.

Let me make this perfectly clear : there is never any excuse to ignore the evidence. If you don’t feel like examining the evidence before making up your mind about the truth or falsity of a given statement, that’s your prerogative. Obviously, we cannot base every single decision in our busy and complex lives on a careful examination and sober analysis of the facts. Most of our decisions are, in fact, intuitive.

But if one chooses not to examine the evidence with an open mind and an absolute minimum of preconceptions, one then cannot turn around and claim to be doing so in the name of reason, logic, and rationality. That’s violently intellectually dishonest and a shameful betrayal of the very ideals of reason one claims to hold sacrosanct.

One thing that truly galls me is that often, theses so-called skeptics do not have a superior theory to offer to explain a given phenomenon. They mumble something about mass hysteria and consider that sufficient.

But any phenomenon that causes a number of people to simultaneously experience an extraordinary even and retain clear and consistent memories of it is worthy of deeper study, regardless of whether those memories represent something that “really happened” in an objective sense or not.

Take an old axe to grind of mine, the Phoenix Lights. Literally thousands of people saw strange lights in the sky over Phoenix, Arizona on March 13 1997. The police were flooded with nearly identical calls reporting said lights and the V-shaped craft into which they appear to have been embedded. The calls were consistent in what they described and came from a large geographical area and from people of all conceivable walks of life, including judges, doctors, and scientists. 99 percent of these people had no connection to any kind of UFO community or other group that might have “wanted to believe”. The lights, in short, pass any and all reasonable tests for whether or not something objectively happened or not.

And yet, it never became the Most Important Story Ever, like you would think it would. The governor of the state made some dumb joke about aliens at  press conference and everybody laughed it off and the story just plain disappeared.

If I had been there and seen the lights, I would like to think that I would not have rested until someone gave me a plausible explanation as to what the fuck happened. I don’t care whether you think it was aliens or not. I want to know what caused all these people to see the same extraordinary thing at the same time.

It is vastly insufficient to say “I don’t know what it was, but I know it wasn’t aliens!”. And “mass hysteria” is not a sufficient answer either unless you can also explain how mass hysteria works in general and how it worked in this particular instance to create the effect we are discussing.

In fact, if you take aliens out of the equation, the problem only becomes more urgent and more interesting, because no known phenomenon could cause all those people to have the same multisensory and detailed hallucination. It sure as fuck can’t be swamp gas, weather balloons, reflected headlights, or the fucking planet Venus.

I would agree that there is insufficient evidence to conclude it was aliens. I’ve never believed in that kind of unsupportable leap of logic… that if it can’t be explained, it must be aliens, or unicorns, or whatever pet theory people are keen to believe because it reinforces their existing beliefs and said beliefs make the world a more magical, exciting, and interesting place.

At least, that’s how I explain how people hold on to beliefs in things like angels or fairies or Clarke level aliens who have a message so vitally important to the human race that they only send it to one person and very badly, at that.

Why not just tap into the Internet and email everybody at the same time?

And the thing is, from a survival standpoint, these beliefs are adaptive as long as they do not interfere with normal everyday life. Whether it’s someone building a UFO in their back yard in order to “go home” or someone who goes to a special building once a week to connect with an omnipotent sky father. these beliefs are beneficial because they reduce stress, foster a sense of community, express people’s deep beliefs, and above all, make people feel connected to something bigger than themselves.

That last one is extremely important, and hard for us rational-realist types to find. We can find community and we can dedicate ourselves to causes we believe in, but that all important sense of being under the protections of a strong leader who can defeat any evil that threatens us cannot really be found in an entirely secular life.

That’s why, I think, that even people driven from the faith of their youth by the morally unacceptable attitudes and unanswered questions often retain a shred of it somewhere deep in their minds, Just enough to preserve that sense of connection.

Which has no relevance to the original topic of this post.

But you nice people must be used to that by now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This weekend has been pretty blah.

For one thing, I have been sleeping a lot. And not the good kind of sleep, the kind that leaves you feeling refreshed and restored.

No, it’s all been that shitty sleep that sometimes seems like it does more harm than good. It certainly doesn’t make me feel rested. Instead, I ended up locked in this cycle of napping where I sleep, get up for a little while, then go back to sleep because the sleep I am getting isn’t doing me any good and I am still very tired.

At this very moment, even though I just got out of bed, I wish I could go back to bed and sleep for another eight hours.

The whole thing leaves me feeling lost and disoriented and somewhat pissed off at the bullshit life puts me through.

Oh well. All I can do is keep trudging onward until I get to the next good bit. In the meantime, do what I can to take care of myself.

I’ve been slacking off on that like hell lately. Eating the wrong things, forgetting to take my insulin, not keeping to my routine. Stuff I know leads to an unhappier me but like an idiot I keep on doing it anyhow.

I am pretty sure that, on a subconscious level, I am punishing myself. Or at the very least, taking out my extremely impotent rage on myself. I can feel the rage of it in my mind. I am a person who wages war against himself on a daily basis.

The good news is, I usually win. Which means I lose. Le sigh.

Gah, the words, they do not come easy today. I’m too tired, despite the caffeine in my system from the Diet Coke I had with my lunch. Normally, I am brimming with words and it’s no big deal to write some of them down. It’s far from effortless, but at least the words are there, waiting to be pressed onto the page.

But right now, I feel like I am out of words. And yet, I have 647 of them to go.

I wish I had a pocket dimension just for napping. A place outside of time so that I can sleep for as long as I want there and when I am done, only a couple of seconds has passed. ^[1] It would be very comfortable, with gravity set to 0.25 G – enough so that I am not in freefall and dealing with all the zero gee complications, but I am still much lighter than usual and my body gets a rest from supporting my enormous weight for a while. It would be dimly lit or possibly even pitch black – it would depend on how I react to total darkness. And it would, of course, be just the right temperature for sleep. Dunno what that is. Whatever temperature would keep me cool without making me feel cold. A temperature so perfect that I wouldn’t need a blanket.

And while I am dreaming big about sleep, there’s the issue of what I am sleeping on.The truth is, I have no idea. I don’t know what my ideal sleeping surface would be. Maybe it would be nothing more fanciful than a high end bed with perpetually clean and fresh linens and sophisticated springs that spread my reduced weight evenly, with no pressure points. Maybe it would be some kind of energy field that does the same thing. Maybe it would be the back of some benevolent creature who loves me and will protect me as I sleep. A creature that vibrates at just the right frequencies to vibro-massage all the tension out of my body so I can truly relax.

Of course, while in realtime only a few seconds have passed in real time, in my own subjective time all that perfect sleep has taken the same amount of time as if I had slept in real time, so I would age the same amount.

Fine by me. I just want to know what it is like to have slept well. I am not sure I have ever had truly good sleep. All that varies is the level of crappiness. I am pretty sure that if I ever well and truly caught up on sleep, I would be a much happier and more focused person.

One problem with my nap dimension : a place where I am very comfortable and there is no time pressure forcing me to do things might end up being where I spend all of my subjective time. The contrast between life in my little sleep bubble and life outside it would be quite stark and I might end up spending weeks or even years in there.

And then, when I finally forced myself to go back to real time, it would be as if I had aged however many years in a few seconds. And that would suck (not to mention tip off the rest of the world that something weird is going on) and so I would have still more reason to stay in my cozy hidey-hole.

So it would have to be boring. No way to use a computer or a tablet or a TV. Too dark to read. Only big enough for me, so there would be no way to bring someone to talk to.

That way, the lack of stimulation which aids sleep would also be the incentive to get the fuck out of there once I am rested up.

Real time might be a harsher place that my little dimension, but boredom is a powerful motivator for a high IQ dude like me.

And speaking of stimulation, I’mma go play Witcher 3 now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Felicity, please skip this one, as I am going to discuss what we were arguing over Friday night and I don’t want it to turn into a whole thing all over again.

In fact, I am kind of ashamed of how long I did argue about it with you. Anyhow.

The basic idea, and the crux of disagreement involves a very specific and tricky piece of moral reasoning. The issue in question is whether or not the right person with the right motive and the right intentions deserves to succeed at what they attempt even if they are using the wrong method.

Felicity says yes, and I say no. Sort of. It’s complicated.

To my feverishly pragmatic mind, I can’t imagine caring one way or another about it. To me, the person using the wrong method does not deserve success in their attempt. I don’t think meaning well matters when it comes to successfully getting something done. The world works a certain way, and your method either works according to those existing facts or it doesn’t. Period.

In fact, it would be unfair, in my books, to hand success to someone who means well but did not take pragmatic concerns into account. It would be like giving a kid an A on a test that all the other students studied really hard for just because the kid meant well.

In short, to me, success going to the person with the right method is perfectly fair, down to the mathematical level.

Otherwise, I would have to find it somehow unjust that a nice person with a good heart and pure intentions is not succeeding at giving money to a homeless person because their method for doing so is to staple their dick to the wall.

But that’s where things get tricky, because I am not at all sure whether it’s that I don’t think a good person failing due to a bad method is unfair, or that I simply do not care. By that I mean, to me, it may or may not be fair or unfair, but the bottom line is that I don’t consider the question to be worth pursuing. If it’s unfair, it’s a form of unfairness so abstract and obscure as to be worse than useless as a factor in moral reasoning.

And I am too dedicated to the humanist endeavour to waste time on petty academic distinctions when there is so much that needs to be done to help humanity live healthy, strong, and free lives where everyone’s concerns are taken into account and we all strive to make life saner, smarter, softer, fairer, and happier for all of humanity.

That is my cause and my morality. In the service of this cause, I consider it to be my duty to avoid anything that will distract or sidetrack me away from the mission into irrelevancies. The project, as it were, is far too important to me to risk losing sight of the goal because I wasted my time on earth on meaningless bullshit.

In fact, I think a lot of the problems of the world are either caused or allowed to thrive precisely because people with the best of intentions and hearts as pure and strong as a mountain stream nevertheless refuse to do the absolute basic first step in solving a problem : knowing and accepting the truth of how things are right now.

That does not mean accepting that you cannot change things. This isn’t that old “that’s just the way it is” bullshit. Bruce Hornsby and the Range put that crap to bed in the 80’s.

No, all I am saying is that if you don’t know where you are, you can’t ever get where you want to go. So the first duty of anyone who is true to their ideals, no matter what those ideals are, is to take as clear and unfiltered look at reality they can.

Once you have as clear a picture of how things stand as possible, taking how you want them to be out of the equation, you can then move on to thinking of how you want them to be and what steps are needed in order to move things closer to how you feel they should be.

But in this step, too, you must remove all irrelevancies from your thinking and focus on results. To my mind, if you do not do this, you are not truly dedicated to your ideal because you are putting your own personal issues ahead of them. All that matters is making the world a better place, and that means results. Not rhetoric, not bullshit theories that sound grand but mean nothing, not sitting around morally masturbating one another about what great people we are, not preening oneself for maximum social dominance amongst our more-PC-than-thou peer group, not being more concerned with being seen to be middle class than to help those you say you are trying to help, not patronizing attempts to help people that treat them like idiots and assume they should be grateful for the help their are getting from people who are quite obviously superior to them and who should be heaper with praise for even being willing to go near them… none of that crap.

You do whatever to truly believe has the best odds of succeeding based on an objective, cautious, thorough analysis of the situation as it is right now.

Everything else is petty stupid bullshit and a betrayal of what you claim to believe.

So I have no problem saying I do not care who “deserves” to succeed. It is utterly irrelevant and can only distract from the aims of our ideals. I would never say intentions don’t count for anything – an impractical person with good intentions is still a good person.

But I don’t feel bad for those who do not succeed when they are using the wrong method. I’m sorry they are going to feel bad about it, but that will give them the incentive to learn, adapt, and try again until they get it right.

To me, that is perfectly fair. And I know that makes me seem cold and inhuman to some. But it is the only moral path as I see it. And the only way to stay focused on the end goal.

A happier, healthier, more actualized life for human beings.

That’s worth whatever sacrifice I need to make in order to get there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There’s a new hit musical on Broadway and it feels like it was written for people exactly like me. It’s called Dear Even Hansen, and it’s about a socially isolated and lonely boy who gets drawn deeper and deeper into Internet culture as a lie he tells – that he was good friends with a boy who had committed suicide – spirals out of control.

In this song, he describes his perfect day with his “friend” to the kid’s grieving mother, who is desperate for something she can hold on to after her son’s death.

And this song really moves me. So fair warning, it might move you too.

The song moves me so much because it’s so clearly (to me) the product of a very lonely person dreaming a perfect dream of all the love and connection and friendship that the real world has denied him and that he yearns for more than anything at all.

And I know exactly what that’s like. I basically was Evan Hansen in high school. For most of high school I had no friends at all. No friends, no social group, no clique, no invitations, no validation, and absolutely no hint or trace of romance.

In many ways, that kind of isolation harms a member of a social species like ours. I was miserable all the time, and the gates to my heart froze shut. I was emotionally unstable and went through deep distortions of emotional affect which led to times when I felt like I was the only person on Earth and everyone else was the shadow of the ghost of smoke, and other times when everything in my life seemed hostile and alien and strange, and other times when I felt such futile and impotent rage at the world and at myself that I wanted to destroy myself utterly in some huge dramatic way that would force the world to notice me and realize what they lost by ignoring or being outright hostile to me for so long.

So yeah. I was Even Hansen. But I was the suicide kid too.

Let me tell you about one of the worst days of my life. I had stayed home from high school because I was too depressed to go. This happened a lot in high school. I got away with it because I was so bright that I could do the homework and ace the test without attending every single class. But it was, in its own sad way, a cry for help.

Historically, those have never worked for me.

On that particular day, I was so depressed that I couldn’t take it any more. I wrote a suicide note – in blank verse form – and left it on the kitchen table and then I went looking for a means to kill myself.

My first stop was my father’s bedroom because that is where our guns were stored. I stared at my dad’s big .22 caliber rifle. That would do the trick. Click, bang, done. One act of will and I would be free of having to be me forever.

It was a lot like this, actually.

But in the state I was in, I was not able to image what steps I would have needed to go through to load the gun then prop it up somewhere and rig a way for me to pull the trigger with the barrel facing my head.

So I didn’t end up doing that.

Then I drifted into the bathroom and look at all those products with the poison symbol on them. All the cleaners and solvents and other common household toxins. I thought about taking a bottle and downing it, just chugging it down. Then it would be inside me and it would be too late for me to do anything about it and I would die.

But I didn’t know which one would kill me dead and which ones would just make me really sick and land me in the hospital but leave me alive and in a lot of pain.

And I was all alone in the house, so nobody would be there to notice my plight for around seven hours. That’s a lot of time to spend in agonizing pain.

So that was out. That’s when I went downstairs and got the knife.

It was our biggest knife, a huge butcher’s knife with a very sharp blade. Somehow, I ended up in my father’s bedroom again, and I sat on the end of his bed with the knife in my hand and thought about doing it.

Obviously, I didn’t do it. Eventually, I got so tired that it was all I could do to put the knife back in the rack in the kitchen and go to my bedroom to lay down and sleep.

I don’t remember a lot of the rest of the day, I know I didn’t eat. I might have watched some TV, but probably not. I think I just slept as much as I could.

Then my mother comes home, and finds the note. Oops.

She calls my name, panicked. This makes me very happy. Someone really does care. That wasn’t the reason I wrote the note but I am super happy nevertheless, and a tiny spark of warmth flares briefly in my ice bound heart.

I tell my mother that it was only a poem. She grumbles at me for upsetting her with my poetry. But she must suspect the truth.

I feel bad about how good that made me feel. But I was so depressed that it felt like I didn’t even really exist and that nobody would miss me when I was gone because they didn’t even notice me when I was alive, so what’s to miss?

And just like when I was severely depressed adut, I actually thought that people would pretend to be sad about my death because that seemed like what they were supposed to do in such an occasion, but everyone would really be glad I was gone so they didn’t have the burden of my existence any more.

Psychosis makes you see things that are not there.

Neurosis makes you feel things that are not true.

I really felt like the world would better off without me.

Thank God I survived that, and the crushing depression that came after my parents took me and my brother out of school later and didn’t relent until…. fall 2014 or so?

Whenever I went to Kwantlen, anyhow.

If the internet had been around when I was in high school, I might have gotten through it better. But I might also have become a horrible person once I discovered trolling and started using all my verbal skills to punish the world for denying me.

I had a lot less self-discipline back then, and a much poorer understanding of the world and how I contributed to my own problems.

Lashing out at the world would have made a lot of sense to me back then.

I’m just glad the school shooting meme was not out there at the time, or I might have gotten some very bad ideas.

But now, here I am, getting my life started, and with people showing interest in my talents on Upwork and on track to make a name for myself.

I am so glad I am alive to enjoy it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about my recent revelation about how I counteract my anxiety by entering into a sort of glassy-eyed optimistic stunned state where I don’t feel anxious – in fact, it can feel kinda good – but where I am functionally very stupid because in order to reach this state, I have to jettison all anxiety-producing mental processes.

And that eliminates most higher brain functions, particularly one of the frontal lobe variety concerned with forethought. And without forethought, bang goes my executive function.

So all that brilliant shiny mental machinery I have developed  for things like planning, caution, and above all analysis lies idle and useless because that’s my mind’s way of getting me through whatever I have to get through despite my anxiety issues.

One thing I realized during therapy on Tuesday was that I learned it from my mother. That’s how she dealt with life too. My mother and I are a lot alike in many ways, and I think one of those ways is that we are both very sensitive and nervous people.

So it was perfectly natural that I was going to follow her example when it came to dealing with my own anxiety. My mother, as the saying goes, dealt with things by not dealing with them, and often seemed, in retrospect, to be living in a kind of dream world where everything was artificially warm and happy and wonderful.

This coping strategy is very common in abused spouses, especially those of a certain era. The abused partner retreats into their own fantasy world, a positive image of the dark domestic fantasy world that the abuser feels they have been denied. The victim’s version is not, however, used as an impossible to meet set of criterion that the abuser ‘s mind uses to justify trying to punish the world into being “right” with their anger.

The victim’s version is, instead, something that the victim’s mind energetically reinterprets reality to fit. This can be at least nominally justified by calling it “looking on the bright side” or similar. But it’s really a rose colored glasses level of active delusion.

Dammit. I started out talking about myself and ended up in “professor mode” instead. I’ve got to keep an eye out for that better.

I have a lot of modes.

Anyhow, back to me. The thing about “stupid mode” is that it only takes out very specific, very high level brain functions while leaving the rest running smoothly. So it’s not like if you were to talk to me when I am in this mode that I would be any less articulate, insightful, witty, or sweet-natured.

No, it would be subtler than that, and thus, more confusing in the end. I would seem to be my usual self, but you would get the feeling that I wasn’t really there. That I was talking to you as if you were a customer at my drive-thru window and I am mostly paying attention to things going on inside the restaurant. Or maybe it would feel more like I am putting on a show for you to entertain you until you leave, preferably soon.

I’m a wizard with mixed messages like that. Part of me wants you to like me and to be a fun person who is good company and a blast to be around.

And part of me wants you to go the fuck away as soon as possible so I can crawl back into my hole and shut out all the anxiety-producing social stimulation bury myself in my distractions until I am calm again.

And I don’t like that I send out these conflicting signals. I want to send clear, friendly, self-possessed and confident signals that don’t radiate anxiety to one and all.

And it goes beyond (or below) anxiety. I have been around people like me – terribly bright but frightfully nervous – and it’s not pleasant. The sheer intensity of it all can tire you out, and make it hard to endure the person in question for very long.

And that’s true independent of whether or not you’re finding them funny or interesting or whatever. Sooner than later, you will want to escape the brilliant white spotlight of their attention and go back to regular reality to recover.

Hmmm,. I’m still technically talking about myself, but not really.

My point is that this “stupid mode” really fucks up my life. I am starting to thing it’s the root of a lot of my problems, like my absentmindedness and my doing dumb shit that, later on, will seem obviously wrong and that I would have seen that if I had just thought about it for two seconds beforehand.

Bu that’s just it. I’m not thinking about things at all. Thinking brings anxiety. Instead, I am improvising. Making things up as I go. And on some level, I do it assuming that my natural gifts will be enough to see me through.

Despite how often that has proven to be very very wrong.

But that’s the thing about this kind of self-destructive optimism. It does not learn from experience. The need for its solace is too great to allow anything as petty as “knowing better” interfere with the cycle.

Instead, I end up just going with my gut, like any common moron.

I suppose it’s all part of the grand integration that is my recovery process. Right now, this brilliant mind of mine only works at fully capacity when I am alone and calm and not stimulated too much.

That’s a pretty artificial and hard to maintain state. If I am to finally come out of this FUCKING shell of mine and walk in the light, I will have to develop my ability to be functional when out in the world, and that means exposure.

If you don’t endure, you won’t adapt.

It’s a terrifying thought, but on the bright side, the idea of coming even halfway close to making my life be as smart as I am is a tantalizing thought.

I have such powerful abilities.

But the person at the controls is still pretty weak.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was therapy day for me.

And we hit on a lot of very important areas. Like, for instance,. my seemingly eternal bête noire, anger. The thing I least want to talk about.

Ergo, the thing I most need to talk about. That’s how it works, folks. I know that sucks, but it’s still the best way to find out where your real problems lay.

Right where you’re the most uncomfortable!

Anger is a huge issue for me because I don’t know to express it in a healthy, natural way. I don’t know how to let it out in a measured way and at the appropriate times. I don’t know how to stick up for myself without going totally pugilistic about it.

I blame my parents. Both in general, and in this specific case. They were my examples of how to deal with life, and one was angry all the god damned time and the other almost never ever expressed anger in any way.

Guess which one I take after.

I fear my own anger because I don’t want to hurt people. And I know I can hurt people really bad if I cut loose. My therapist says that I should not worry so much about my power to hurt people and that people can handle more than I think they can.

And that is truly excellent advice… for most people. But not for me.

I know that my razor-sharp verbal skills times my force of personality times my deep psychological insights equals a devastating combo that could seriously hurt someone – on a psychological level – if I did not hold myself back.

Especially in person, because then my large presence and just plain largeness also come into effect. Being big amplifies everything.

That’s why you get gentle giants. The giant has to be extremely gentle in order to be nonthreatening to people. He knows how easily he can scare people.

So I can’t just pull out all the stops and let the chips fall where they may. There is no way I am going to let my personal demons loose on the world. Nobody deserves my full wrath unless they are about to kill someone, and even then, only if it would work.

I mean, I gave one of my high school teachers a heart attack by telling him to go fuck himself with the full force of my personality powering its vehemence.

That was a real eye opener. Maybe it was a one-off thing. Maybe he had a bad heart. Maybe he would have had that heart attack no matter what happened to him.

But that’s one of the only times in my life that I have ever put all I had behind what I was saying, and it damn near killed someone. His brother had to substitute for him. I don’t think he ever went back to teaching.

So no. I can’t play by the same rules as everyone else. The stakes are too high. I doubt I would give another person a heart attack, but that incident illustrates the sheer amplitude of my effect on others when I do not control myself.

Now, you know why figuring out how to express my anger in a healthy way is such a delicate calibration for me. It’s like trying to teach an elephant to walk on its toes.

This leaves me with no acceptable outlet for my anger, however, and one definition of depression is anger expressed inward – in other words, taking it out on yourself.

So while I sometimes wonder what I can do to get this brutal and unforgiving self-judgement that looks down on me (with eyes made of suns whose light burns me) to lay off me for a while, deep down I already know.

Take its anger away by expressing it.

My therapist once suggested I try to put it into my writing. And that sounds good on paper (so to speak). I certainly have all the requisite skills, and a lot of repressed anger to express. I would not run out of fuel any time soon.

But the truth is, I am terrified of the places such writing would take me. I really don’t want to go there. I’m afraid that I wouldn’t know who I am any more because I would be lost in the rapture of catharsis and the pleasure of the unharnessed id given full expression.

Plus, any writing produced in such a way would be so goddamned dark and angry that it would make Clive Barker look like A..A. Milne. I don’t know what exactly it would be about, but there would be metaphorical and literal acts of cannibalism, acts of perfect sadism, people being destroyed by having their darkest dreams come true, and a lot of harsh, uncompromising moral interplay.

So, ya know, a real fun time for all.

Hmmm. Maybe good ol’ Clive isn’t a bad place to start. He sure was fuck worked out some really dark shit in print, especially before he came out of the closet. Writing that stuff down makes it seem a lot more doable to me. Very interesting.

Coming soon to this space : demons, serial killers, cannibals, rage monsters, and perfectly ordinary seeming people who one day snap.

Of course, that might get in the way of my career as a comedy writer. But I suppose being a rich and famous writer would be awesome regardless of genre.

But I want to make people happy! I want to make them laugh!

I suppose I could write really fucked up yet hilarious horror stories. There has to be a market for that. Even Pratchett has truly scary people as his villains, and he was successful. Maybe people are ready for comedy/horror done my style.

Hmmm. This idea has possibilities now that I have pulled myself through the cognitive roadblock in front of it. This idea actually has a lot of possibilities.

Thanks, folks, for helping me get through this.

After all, if no-one was reading this. I wouldn’t be doing it.

And if I wasn’t doing it…. I would probably still be hyper depressed.

So thank you all. Your readership keeps me going.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is stressing me out.

I get an email saying my web host (the people who host this lovely blog) can’t process my latest payment. This is weird, because when I cashed my cheque a couple of weeks ago, I put $75 on the card and I have not spent any of it. So the only place the money could go was to pay for my web host ($12.95/month… ouch) and Netflix.

So I go to look up my balance, and get stopped because it won’t let me log in unless I remember the answers to security questions I set up a year ago.

One of which asks for the model of my cell phone, and I don’t even own one.

So I call the card’s 1-866 number, set up a callback, phone rings, it’s the credit card people and the nice dude I talked to on the line gets me to fail those questions three times so it locks me out. He then unlocks the account and resets the security questions so I can put in new answers.

Lovely. Except I remember how maddening this process was the first time because of the insane damned questions.

Here’s what I have to choose from.

What is the LAST name of your current manager at your primary place of employment?

I have no idea. Upwork does not give last names, just last initials. So as far as I know, my manager’s last name is N.

What is the BRAND of your primary desktop computer at home? (EG If you have a Dell Inspirion 660, enter “DELL”)

My computer doesn’t have a brand because it’s a custom build.

What is the BRAND of your primary desktop computer at home? (EG If you have a Dell Inspirion 660, enter “DELL”)

I work from home, so it’s the same computer from the previous question.

What is the HOUSE NUMBER of the home you lived in ten years ago? (EG If ten years ago you lived at “123 Main Street”, enter “123”)

Seriously?? Who the fuck knows that kind of thing? I’m lucky if I remember where I was yesterday, for crying out loud.

What is the BRAND of your primary laptop computer at home? (EG If you have a Dell E6420, enter “DELL”)

Oh, my PRIMARY laptop. Like most people have more than one. My laptop, intriguingly enough. has nothing on it to indicate a brand name or anything of that sort. And it runs Linux, so I don’t know how to figure it out through software.

What is the MODEL of your primary cell phone? (EG If you have an iPhone 4S, enter “IPHONE 4S”)

No cell phone. Which means I am a cave-dwelling troglodyte by modern standards. I will get around to getting a Fido phone eventually, I am sure.

What is the BRAND NAME of your primary grocery store? (EG If you primarily buy your groceries at “Johns Groceries”, enter “JOHNS GROCERIES”)

OMG, one I can answer. It’s Costco. That’s where we get our groceries. Us, and like half the other people in the GVRD.

What was the BUILDING NUMBER of your primary place of employment five years ago? (EG If five years ago you worked at “123 Main Street”, enter “123”)

Not applicable, as I was not employed five years ago.

What is the BRAND of your primary laptop computer at work? (EG If you have a Dell E6420, enter “DELL”)

Same laptop as above and I still don’t know.

See what I am up against? Some of those questions, I submit, are things most people won’t know off the top of their heads. They turn the questions into a bizarre pop quiz on the details of your past. Like you are being interrogated by some extremely picky and fussy police officers trying to find inconsistencies in your story.

It has, of course, occurred to me that my answers are going to be recorded without any verification, making them basically arbitrary strings of alphanumeric characters. I could put anything I want in there. Nobody would know the difference.

So I am seriously considering answering “kumquat” to every single question. Last name of current employer? Kumquat. Model of current laptop? Kumquat. House number of that little pl;ace where you bought a map in Paris thirty years ago? KUMQUAT.

I have to answer four of the questions in order to be allowed to have money in this digital age, or something like that. It makes me feel like I am being asked for my papers at a checkpoint in some fascist state.

Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but still. It’s harsh to go to do something very normal, like checking the balance on my reloadable Visa, and suddenly have it become this whole thing fully of unexpected complications and stress.

Still pondering the kumquat thing. The part of me that is the well behaved product of the Canadian middle class feels like it would be wrong to do said kumquat thing and that somehow, I would get caught and be in trouble.

But the supervillain side of me, the side that makes me fall in love with my own cleverness and the desire to prove to the world that I don’t have to follow its stupid rules, wants to do that and laugh afterwards.

So it remains to be seen which one will win out. Odds are that I will behave.

Yeah, I behaved. And my balance is 77 bucks, so the payment was not blocked due to lack of funds. But it says my account is suspended.

Which means I will have to call the hotline AGAIN and find out WTF that is all about.

Why must things be so darn stressful? Why did I want to get a life again?

Oh well, I am sure I will have it all cleared up soon. I just get stressed out about things very easily when it has to do with money. I have never had much, and I have to be super careful with what little I get, so I end up stressing about it a lot.

But that would not necessarily change with more income. I think there’s a good chance that I am just cautious and careful by nature and that even if I had a million bucks in the bank, I would fret about spending.

I can’t help it. I’m a Taurus, and we deal with the nuts and bolts of life through our caution and foresight. It’s your only choice when you are not exactly quick off the block.

Of course, I would fret a lot less about the little stuff with a million bucks in the bank. Or in low-risk low-yield investments in order to stay ahead of inflation and allow me a nice little annuity to live on.

OK, I have officially started to babble I better end this now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.