Having a sleepy period. It’s very annoying. I want to DO things!

Been playing a lot of Witcher 3 : The Wild Hunt lately. It’s the game I got for my birthday from a very dear online furry friend. He’s so sweet.

And it’s quite good. Its main asset is its depth. There is an amazing amount of content to explore. And some of it is extremely well written, if rather dark.

But I can do dark. Dark works for me. If I wasn’t in a position where I can fight the dark at least some of the time, it would depress me. But in the game, I am the hero, and I can fight the darkness and prevent it, or at least exact justice for it.

Here’s an example of the high grimdark quotient of the game : on one of the shorter and less complicated quests, I am hired by a man to find his wife. I talk to the sister of said wife as part of the investigation, and she is quite sure that her sister is dead after having wandered off into the swamp alone. And so there’s no need to investigate further, really, because I will never find the body. She also goes on about what a great man her brother in law, the guy who hired me, is.

That is, of course, suspicious as fuck, and I (the player) am convinced she killed her sister in order to get the guy who hired me (we’ll call him Neville) all to herself.

I investigate further, and discover an underground passage underneath the place where Neville and the sister (let’s call her Bitch) live together. When I enter the cave, Bitch shows up and offers me double whatever Neville’s paying me to stop investigating right now and just tell Neville that she’s dead. I, of course, decline. Homey don’t play that. In said passage, I find the remains of Neville’s wife. She’d dead alright. Ripped to pieces by something very strong and very big. with long sharp claws. There’s also some tufts of fur, scattered bones of animals, and bloodstains on the wall.

This all points to the murderer being a werewolf. I wait until nightfall, hoping to trap the beast. Sure enough, there’s a werewolf in the cave when I return. I fight it and almost kill it, then just as I am about to deliver the fatal blow,. Bitch shows up and pleads for me not to hurt the werewolf because it is, in truth, (dramatic REVEAL!) the werewolf is Neville, the man she loves.

She confessed to having lured her sister down into the cave, knowing that it was the place Neville went in order to isolate himself when it was time to wolf out.

She claims she only meant to scare her away from wanting Neville by letting her see her husband as he changed. But now he knows why his mouth tasted of blood when he woke up the morning. He had killed his wife, the woman he loved more than anything in the world, while a werewolf. And now he knew.

At that point, I had a choice. Kill him right then and let Bitch go free, or stand back and let him exact brutal revenge on Bitch.

Going against my usual preference for maximum nobility, I let him kill Bitch. She made him kill his wife and wake up with her blood in his mouth and (presumably) some of her in his stomach. I couldn’t kill Neville, whom she had so deeply wronged, and let Bitch, the one who did it to her, go free.

So chomp chomp, he kills her, then begs me to kill him because he has nothing left in the world and can’t live with the knowledge of what he’s done, and is tired of living with his curse. I grant him this mercy.

That’s typical of the tone of the game, which is, I think, a major factor in its universal appeal. For a lot of people, a storyline like that would be impressively dark and moving and grim, and that could be transformational for some people.

But I have had depression for a long time and to me, that storyline  is just another day. A day in which my grimly dedicated services are needed to resolve a situation, even if that resolution leads to two deaths.

On a lighter note, I have figure out that the character I play, Geralt, is basically Christopher Lambert. You know, the guy who played Raiden in the Mortal Kombat movie?

I mean, look at him :

There can be only one… lawsuit?

He’s got the white hair, he’s got the rough unshaven facial features, the same grim look.

And this is what he sounds like :

The accent seals it for me. I actually thought they might have gotten Lambert himself to do the voice. But no, it’s this guy doing a Lambert impression :

That’s Lambert alright. Not that I mind. Lambert’s a very cool actor and it’s very cool to see “him” in a role with decent writing, unlike a lot of his vehicles.

But I wonder how he feels about it.

Oh, and for a long time, the game would freeze up for 2-7 seconds at random intervals. And I put up with it because it’s a great game. But after having tried eight or nine other things that the Internet suggested, I finally found one that works. Yay!

That will make playing a lot less aggravating. Although, truth be told, I had adjusted to the pauses to such an extent that I didn’t even notice them half the time.

And that’s weird.. Where was my mind going while I waited?

It made me feel like the game was winning. So I had to find a solution before this missing time thing did not creep into my life.

I mean, sure, it would be nice not to subjectively experience annoying delays and skip a lot of waiting for things.

But I am pretty sure that spacing out all the time would be pretty freaky to others and not at all how a sane person behaves.

And sanity is my goal, distant though it might be.

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to sane. I have been depressed for my entire life, starting when I got molested at the tender age of 3.

But I will get there. Some day I will catch up to that massive emotional backlog and free myself of all that ice around my heart and walk, healthy and dry, in the sunlight.

Until then, all I can do is keep plodding along.

Luckily, I am very good at that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For the most part, I don’t experience my depression consciously. It’s like a software virus that lurks among the background processes of my mind, and has a profound effect, but as a survival mechanism, I have learned to screen it out and pour myself into my distractions and shut out nearly everything else in order to keep my mind too busy to let the bad thoughts get in, most of the time.

It’s not a good coping mechanism. In fact, it’s a lousy one… quite maladaptive. It is dependent on me maintaining a very low physical stimulus lifestyle and not venturing outside of my tiny little comfort zone. It requires to spend all or most of my time buried in those aforementioned distractions. So I spend all of an average day  reading, sleeping, using my computer, or eating while watching Netflix. ^[1]

And this coping mechanism works up to a point. Sure, it sucked 20 years of my life away and is the main reason that I am just getting started with my life at 44, but on the other hand, it kept me alive and away from suicidal thoughts of self-loathing and a panicky desire to escape from being myself no matter what the cost.

There’s been many a time I have wished life had a reset button, or at least let me save my game when I am doing well.

TheComedyGeek = me

I feel lucky that I got the education I did, then found Upwork, a place where I can get paid for doing my writing thang from the comfort of my existing techno-hermit lifestyle.

Anyhow, like I said, most of the time, I can tune my depression out.

But there are these moments…

I never know when they will strike. I assume it’s whenever some part of my emotional healing process has enough of an electrical potential built up that it discharges. ^[2] One second I will be fine, and the next,  I feel cold and detached and isolated and depressed. It’s like someone threw a bucket of ice water at my soul.

That’s how I feel right now. It’s not that I got bad news, or thought of something awful, or realized I forgot something super important, or screwed up and ended up late and lost again or disappointing a lot of people. ^[3] Nothing bad happened.

But when I got up from eating and watching Netflix, the icy hold hand of death reached into my soul and froze me inside.

Who knows, maybe it was nothing more than the ghosts and shadows which chase me through my days finally getting a chance to catch up with me.

Or maybe it’s just low blood sugar. Who knows.

Now overall, I am not worried about this freeze because I know I will thaw out again. This is just one of those bits of emotional bad weather I have to endure. This too shall pass.

Not long from now, I will go back to enjoying my “day off” and being in a fairly good mood about stuff. Possibly I will have to hit the soft reset button on my brain and take a nap first. Bit either way, soon, it will be over.

But until then, it’s really fucking cold inside me right now.

Maybe all I really need is a good cry.

I find myself thinking about people who act on emotion more than I do, which is not very hard. A less enlightened side of me always rolls its eyes and shakes its head whenever I encounter such people doing dumb shit that could have easily been avoided if they had just stopped and thought about it for a moment.

But I have no moral standing on that issue. I am cognitively capable of that kind of forethought and planning, but I am far too emotionally immature to pull it off.

Instead, I end up doing things as thoughtlessly as those with far less IQ to draw on that I got, only with less justification.

I suppose that if I was capable of fully embracing a kind of “go with the flow” attitude in my life, I might be able to develop the necessary fatalism to deal with my lack of the emotional muscle to stay in the moment of pondering plans long enough to do it right.

Not total fatalism. Then I wouldn’t plan anything at all, because what would be the point of planning be if everything is going to happen the way it’s going to happen anyway?

Just enough fatalism to limit my compulsive attempts to control outcomes and give myself a hearty helping of forgiveness for all my flaws.

But I can never be the happy go lucky person part of me wants to be. Part of me will always be a worrier and a planner and even an organizer at times.

SO I can’t do either path, really. I will always be suspended in the middle of the n-space between a thousand different dualities, unable to pick between A and B because to choose either would mean losing part of myself.

And I have too little substance to me as is.

Maybe that’s immature, though. Maybe there is no real growth without a sacrifice of self. Maybe the only way to be strong is to choose who you are and stick with it so you can nurture it and let it grow.

Maybe I just need to learn to live with the fact that I only ever get to be this one person with this one particular lifetime to use or lose.

Maybe. But one thing is for sure.

I really need to grow up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve had this story hanging around my browser for a week now, waiting to be used. And seeing as the summer weather seems to have wipe my brain clean of any and all ideas about what to blog about today ^[1], I figure today’s the day to use it as a jumping off point for a blog entry.

I’d say today’s blog entry was going to be about the subject of that article, but we both know that I am unlikely to fulfill that kind of commitment.

Anyhow, the article is about our human need for physical content with other human beings. This includes but is by no means limited to sex. And while the article refers to this need by the extraordinarily ugly phrase “skin hunger”^[2], it makes some very salient points about this tragically under-recognized need.

This sort of thing is what leads people to hire sex workers to hold them and stroke their foreheads for an hour.

As the article notes, we have known for a very long that human beings, along with our closer primate cousins, need to be touched in order to thrive. This is most dramatically illustrated in the case of overcrowded orphanages where the babies all get their physical needs taken care of but there is little to no physical contact with the overworked nurses who barely have time to get everyone fed and clean.

These babies grow up into a group children with much, much higher rates of serious mental illness than the general population. They also tend to be undersized for their age and sometimes even show signs of malnutrition despite having been fed just as well as a baby with active, involved parents.

Some even die. They die from lack of love.

So yeah. This is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a real thing. And I think it has a very profound impact on modern life. I believe that a big part of the spiritual crisis of our age, which leaves even mentally healthy people feeling cold and isolated and empty sometimes, comes from a vastly underserved need for nurturing, and that need is most potently realized in our lack of touch.

It’s not hard to see where it comes from, however. One factor is the association that has formed between “cuddling” and early childhood. Somehow, the need to be touched came to be associated with the “childish things” we are meant to “put away” when we get older. As if the need vanishes along with our baby teeth and onesies.

A more important factor in the formation of this touch deficit is that the closer we naked beach apes live to one another, the more important personal boundaries become.

The epitome of this occurs in super high population density cities like Tokyo. We have all seen the images of people being pushed into a railway car and packed in tight as sardines in a can.

But if you watch carefully, none of those people actually touch one another. At least, not by the contact rules of their society. They might get jostled together, but without even thinking about it, they take great pains to make sure they never touch any of the other people with their hands.

That’s because we can only tolerate that kind of crowding if we feel safe from any kind of intimate contact with strangers. Modern society depends on these social barriers because they are an integral part of suppressing the usual response of a human being to being close to total strangers, which is to move into a state of alertness which may very well turn into aggression as we attempt to establish a more natural spacing.

In fact, it is said that in very high density societies like that of Tokyo, and Japan in general, the only two reasons people touch each other is to fuck, or to fight.

That’s obviously an exaggeration, but it gets the idea across.

And that’s true of less pop-dense societies like Canada as well. It’s true of city life everywhere, at least to some extent. A lot of things become clearer when you realize that living and coming into proximity with hundreds of total strangers is not natural for human beings and we have developed elaborate social structures to deal with that fact.

Where was I? Oh right, touch. Yay, I remembered the point!

It’s these rules that isolate us from healthy sources of human touch.  So much of modern social life is concentrating on preventing intimacy with strangers – there’s no way our human minds could handle that much intimacy – that we end up overcompensating and leaving people feeling unloved, unwanted, and unhappy.

The article talks about it in the context of the inhuman practice of solitary confinement. I’ve experienced a form of that myself due to my agoraphobia. And it definitely made me feel isolated and unloved, to the point of being suicidal.

And it’s led to something which seems counterintuitive at first : I hate being touched by strangers. I really don’t want people I don’t know to touch me. It doesn’t burn like fire to me like I was autistic or anything. I just don’t want people to touch me if I don’t know them,.

And it took me a long time to figure out why. It’s because a touch from a stranger is like a tiny tiny taste of something I want so bad that getting just that tiny taste of it with no hope for any more is downright maddening. It wakes the sleeping giant that is my terrible, terrible loneliness and leaves me worse off because now I am depressed.

All from a casual touch by a stranger who probably meant no harm.

So yeah. I know what skin hunger is all about.

And I wish I could dream up a solution to the problem, both for me and for society, but I can’t. There is no way to get people to touch each other more,. “cuddle parties” aside.

I guess I can’t solve all the world’s problems with my brilliant mind.

But I will never stop trying.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, Thursday, I had therapy.

Therapy Thurdsay. Oh look, it alliterates.

And my therapist brought up something that he had brought up many times before to no effect, but today, I guess I was ready to hear it.

He told me that I should try to take all the deep, dark, horrible shit that I have been through in my life and all the ice cold void it created in me, and try to turn it into comedy.

And that sounds perfectly sensible on paper. Lots of people have done it before. And it’s something that is particularly trendy right now. Some of the most popular comedians and many of the bestselling authors of our time got famous by sharing their most intimate, gut-wrenching, soul-baring, shameful truths with the world in a “warts and all” confessional style that brings a sense of truth to their work and a sense of intimacy with the audience.

Why couldn’t I do that?

And yup, that sure sounds like it makes sense and is probably more or less true. There’s no reason to think I am so different from them that I can’t do the same thing.

And that’s true. On paper.

But people aren’t paper and the truth is never, ever two dimensional.

Before today, when my therapist suggested this, I would agree, but inside I felt like it was one of those “wouldn’t it be nice” things like wishing I could teleport or that Donald Trump and Mike Pence would be assassinated simultaneously. Meaning that while the statement was true – it definitely would be great if I could do that – it’s not something that I felt applied in any sense to me.Iit was something which would be nice but would never actually me an option in reality.

So it meant slightly less than nothing to me. Because it was irritating and made be sad because it was yet another example of people asking me to do something which was simple for them but impossible to me in a way I could not easily articulate.

But today, something clicked. It happened when I was doing me best to be open to the idea, and a very dark joke formulated in my head. It goes like this :

Me, as a comedian : A funny thing happened to be on the way to the theater tonight. I got really depressed and contemplated walking into traffic.

That sums up a lot of why the idea never really seemed like it would work to me. I have all this really dark horrible shit inside me and I’ve been too afraid to let it out in any way because not only did I feel it could never be funny, I felt like it could only destroy people with it toxic negativity and interstellar area level coldness.

And I would be deeply, deeply ashamed of myself if anyone were to see it. That’s not including the guilt I would feel about making myself feel better by making someone else’s life worse…. possible to the point of utterly destroying their soul.

I mean, I can handle this stuff. I’ve had to. And that means I have built in systems to handle the stuff. Long term depression forces that on you.

But when I imagine some healthy innocent who doesn’t even know such darkness can exist, never mind that it actually does, coming along and reading it and having it kill the loving light inside them, my mind shies away from it because it is too horrible to contemplate. The guilt would make me feel nauseous all the way into the core of my soul and the shame would crush me and make me want to die.

It’s all very anal-stage Freudian. Shame about your act of elimination. Fear of someone seeing it. The desire to make it go away as fast as possible and never ever talk about your dirty, horrible act.

You get the idea.

In fact, somewhere in the archives of this very blog is a story I wrote that is so unrelentingly sad and soul-destroying that I am deeply ashamed of having written in and my only excuse for unleashing it into the world was that it was the only way to get it out of my own mind, where it had lived for many, many years.

I won’t like it, or give you the name, or give you any other clues to help you find it. I’m too ashamed of it to do that. And I love my readers and would not unleash that goddamned thing on them again for anything.

So you can see why the idea of taking that stuff and turning it into comedy seems a little, well, counterintuitive to me.

Plus I found it hard to imagine anyone being interested in the story of someone who did absolutely nothing with their life for 20 years. There’s not a lot to tell.

But comedy is not necessarily biography. I could probably do stuff about poverty, failure to launch, dreading being asked what I “do”, and a lot of other stuff.

That’s my big takeaway from today’s therapy session. When I came up with that joke,that was me opening a door in my mind to let the possibly of comedy coming from my deepest darkest places and that being a healthy thing.

So now I dunno. Maybe I really can spin my nastiest shit into comedy gold like so many have before me. It probably wouldn’t be in standup comedy form. It would most likely be a book. A comedy book for very broken people like myself.

There’s lots of us out there. It’s really quite tragic. I can’t help but feel that something must be fundamentally very wrong about a society that produces us. We fucked up bad somewhere along the line.

So it would be a book, but knowing me, I would need to cloak my depressing life in metaphor and allegory in order to get it out of me in a form I could live with.

Maybe something like, “What if Superman’s Kryptonian cradle-ship had crashed on a habitable but lifeless planet instead?”.

He might just grow up a lot like me.

Sorry, Supes. But you’ve been through worse.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.