It’s 10 am.

And I haven’t slept yet.

Instead of becoming more sensible about my new hobby, I have become more foolish. first it was staying up til 5 am. Then 8 am. Now 10 am.

Where will it end? when will I SLEEP?

Some time this afternoon, I suppose. The moment I am done blogging, I will go eat lunch then go to bed. I hope I can get in three or four hours. After that, when I get up, it’s time to work on today’s episode.

Hopefully, I can do the verbal part before Felicity shows up to hang out with La Gang . Then it’s a matter of half an hour of work to put in the visuals.

What can I say. I’m a chatty guy.

The real temptation is to go to sleep right now because, of course, now that I have stopped acquiring and testing and enjoying and etcetera-ing, I can feel the weight of all that sleep I should have been getting weighing me down like leaden armor and my eyes are dropping so much it’s like they are reverse-blinking, closed for more time than they are open. And I am ever so woozy.

I’m serious. The wooz. It’s…. amazing.

But going to sleep now would be ALL kinds of stupid because my blood sugar is already dangerously low. Who knows how low it would be before I woke up?

Assuming I woke up at all.

And so, I snack. Normally I snack for pleasure. Sometimes I snack in order to stop hunger from annoying me. But not today.

Today, I snack…. to live.

That’s one thing I have discovered about my new hobby : as troubling as it has been to have it take up so much of my life in so short a time, when I go directly from it into one of my two daily writing tasks, I find myself brimming with creative energy from the mental stimulation and fun, and the work seems much easier than usual.

That’s why I am blogging now instead of when I wake up later. I am still jazzed from all the sexual adventuring in Skyrim (as well as the regular kind of adventuring) and I figure that is both what is keeping me awake^[1]  and my best chance to get this done today without too much stress and strain.

Plus, I am slap-happy from sleepiness, so I am extra wacky right now. Maybe I should have done my episode instead. Might have been my funniest to date!

You know, I’m pretty funny to date.

So today should be interesting, he hears in a Donald Trump voice in his head because he is the ghost that haunts us all and feeds on our souls while we sleep.

Oops, he just released a statement saying “FAKE NEWS. I have never feasted on anyone’s delicious, juicy, orgasmically better than anything outside of being a ladies room toilet seat , SOUL. They are very good, or so I have heard FROM OTHERS WHO ARE NOT AND NEVER WILL BE ME. I would never do that to anyone. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows what good guy I am. In fact, I am the best person there has ever been at being good. The only other person who came close was Jesus, but really there’s no comparison because he died when he was like 30 and I have been a great guy for over seventy years. In fact, one of the things I’ve always hated about Jesus… ”

The president then clutched his neck as he was hit with a dart from a blowgun wielded by one of his senior staffers, who then bit into his cyanide tooth and died.

“Uh oh!” said the Resident. “Uh oh, uh oh, UH… oh! I’m getting my sleepy time cramp! It’s sleepy time I gotta go sleepy bye now! Bye everybody!”.

The President then slumped to the floor and was shoved hard out of the way by a clearly panicky Sean Spicer, who babbled “the President was obviously going to finish that sentence about what he hates about Jesus by saying “is absolutely nothing because Jesus Christ was, was our Lord and Saviour and came to us in light and perfect to um… um…. help. And Mister Trump never compared himself favorably to the Nazarene, or at all, and anyone who thinks he did is a liberal social justice warrior who makes babies smoke crack. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go, I have to go pikc up my kids at…. at… home. Bye bye!”

Seam Spicer then tried to bite the senir staffer’s cyanide tooth before violently and seemingly joyfully soiling himself while chanting “See? Now they can’t make me do it again! Nobody wants Smelly Sean in the White House. Right? Right. ”

Just as the bewildering miasma of Spider’s effluvia hit the reporters like a sledge hammer to the brain, Steve Bannon appeared in a puff of brimstone and shouted “Our contact has been fulfilled and now I must return you to my master’s embrace. ”

He then unhinged his jaw and swallowed Trump’s head whole, rapidly shedding his human form and emerging as a sluglike serpentine creature who slowly swallowed the president before saying, in a voice like a million angry flies, “I can’t wait to shit him out in Hell!” before leaping into the air, landing with an earth-shattering crash. and wriggling down a freshly opening crack in the floor,  and disappearing.”

This cracks spread and deepened until the White House and everyone and everything in it slid down into the deepest pits of Hell to be doomed ro relive their worst nightmares for all eternity.

For Sean Spicer, not a lot will change.

A reporter who had been stuck in traffic when the incident occurred but watched the whole thing on his iPhone chuckled wryly.

“All in all” he said. “as far as Trump press conferences go, that went pretty well!”.

Wow, where did all that come from? I gotta remember what this kind of writing feels like, because it was a ton of fun and quite cathartic and hey, it might even be funny.

I think I know what would go on my cracked.com pitch reel now.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to lapse into a coma for a bit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I talked pretty tough about my new all-consuming hobby when I talked about it last Saturday, but for whatever reason, I was in a really good mood that day. SO my judgment might not have been too clear when I proudly wrote that this new hobby of mine was great but that I felt no compulsion to indulge it and while it is sometimes hard for me to tear myself away from it, I was the one in control.

Turns out that isn’t even remotely true. Sigh.

I feel like it’s totally rejiggering my motivational structure because I find it so enjoyable that everything else pales in comparison. Even writing in this blog, something I usually enjoy greatly, now feels like a chore to be “gotten through” before l go back to my real life, which is so much more rewarding.

And that is one of the classic signs of addiction. You lose interest in everything else. It’s the first step in the process of being hollowed out by it.

In that, I am no different than any World of Warcraft addict. I have never had the slightest trouble understanding how someone could be so obsessed with the game that they played it (or another like it) to the point of death. When I am really into something, whether it’s my new hobby or writing an episode. I don’t feel things like hunger, thirst, or the need for sleep. The activity itself is stimulating me into a state where I could end up in serious physical jeopardy and have no idea until I get up from the computer.

That happened with my latest low blood sugar incident. I felt fine until I got up from the computer, then it all hit me.

I take that as a warning sign that I need to up my self-discipline game and take care of myself as a matter of course rather than waiting till one of my bodily needs is telling me it needs me to do stuff.

You know, stuff. Like eating and drinking water and using the bathroom and actually having contact with other living beings,with all that unpredictability.

The good news is that I am not even remotely craving doing it right now. except in a very vague and distant sense of curiosity. Dunno how well I’d take it if suddenly it was no longer an option, but I do not feel like doing it right now.

The only thing I crave right now is a nap. I have not been getting enough sleep lately for some unknown reason.

In fact, I mostly feel relief.  Like I had gone crazy for a while and was possessed by an unwholesome fever of the imagination but now I have come to rest and it feels so good to let my brain cool off after all that concentrated stimulation.

The thing is, this fresh hobby of mine is a triple threat, because not only does it satisfy my need for mental stimulation and  my need for sexual novelty, it also stimulates my urge to acquire and amass because there are so many neato ways to expand the game out there that it makes me go berserk like a squirrel who just found a 100 pound back of peanuts and is desperately trying to store them all for the winter.

So when I am not playing the game, I am looking for more mods and more resources for mods and looking up new ways to use the mods I have and it’s all very exhausting.

But of course, I don’t feel that tiredness when the madness takes me. When my circuits are red-hot and what I am doing keeps scratching some of my favorite itches sop damned well, it’s like electromagnetically locked into the circuit until some outside force breaks the connection.

Or until I summon the wherewithal to do it myself, which make take a really long time if I am doing this unaware.

But that won’t happen again. I am getting mad about the whole thing and that should keep me focused enough to set limits for myself.

It’s not easy. But I am doing it anyway.

So from now on, hopefully, I will go into this new hobby of my mind knowing the effect it can have on me., and thinking about when I am going to  disengage, and and then when the time comes, disengage.

No exceptions. No rules to manipulate. No way to weasel out of it.

Hmmm. I wonder if there’s a mod that adds weasels….

And the game doesn’t change no matter how many times I lose it. That’s one of the trickier aspects of self-discipline. You have to completely deny yourself the option of “failing out”. It’s the exact same obligation each and every day no matter what.

That’s a big part of what backs the concept of “taking things one day at a time”.

You have to block all the escape tunnels in you in order to force yourself to have to deal with things instead of evading them. That’s what it takes in order to force a creative and flexible person like myself to stop trying to escape and instead focus on winning.

To me. at least, that is what self-discipline is all about. Anyone can do the things they feel like doing when they feel like doing it. The real measure of a man is whether or not he can do things he does not want to or feel like doing but knows it needs to be done.

I aspire to that kind of self-control. And it makes me mad when other people don’t have it. I try not to let that get to me because I know everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses and I should not be so quick to judge someone who might well be very strong and controlled in a different situation.

But I can never quite suppress all of the contempt I feel towards people like that when I see them in TV and movies. People who fall apart in a crisis. I want to tell them “Have your total emotional breakdown later, dammit!”

After all, that’s what I’d do.

I will hopefully talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up from a nap with this song playing in my head :

That obviously never really happened. We nerds never truly became cool.

I’ve lived long enough to have seen “geek chic” come around twice, in the 90’s and in the last few years. ^[1] And I would love to believe in it. But I can’t. Deep down, I know that nothing much will change.

Even though the hipsters all think they are nerds. I have an update for you on that, kids. If you weren’t bullied, you’re not a nerd. If you don’t express your enthusiasms for “geeky” things without truly thinking about what people with think of you, you’re not a nerd. If you carefully chose every item in your “nerd look”, you aren’t a nerd.

To be a nerd is to live in a society that loves to portray you as the worst kind of person to end up on a date with. To be a nerd is to live with a constant feeling of inferiority, which some of us deal with by pumping up our ego to blimp-like proportions. To be a nerd is to live with the memory of having being dumped by or even turned on by someone who you thought was your friend when they realized what a social liability you are and how with you around, they would never be cool or fit in.

And most of all, to be a nerd is to have no option to just drop the whole thing if it isn’t working. It’s not a look, a style, a fashion, a trend, or a mood.

You’re a nerd like a fish is a fish. You’re the product of a broken society that actively punishes people for being highly intelligent while at the same time pretending that this is something good and of value by patting you on the head for your high marks at school.

But the real marks you get at school are the ones left on your face after a bully pushes you face first into a locker while everybody laughs at your suffering at the hands of your peers. They’re the marks left on your knuckles after you punch the wall in rage and frustration at how actual prosecutable crimes happen to you on a daily basis and not only to the criminals go unpunished, they are rewarded with higher social status while the teachers, who all know this is happened, do absolutely nothing about it because somehow, it’s just fine as long as it’s kids.

They’re the marks left on your soul by social isolation, sexual frustration, and the cold and thoughtless hate of the world.

So no. You are not a nerd just because you put on some prescription free glasses and a baggy sweater and talk about the latest Star Wars movie.

It’s like saying you’re Jewish just because you like bagels.

You have not suffered as my people have suffered. Please do not attempt to co-opt our victimhood for your pleasure.

And for God’s sake, don’t dress up like us for Halloween.

Ahem. But I digress.

The song got me thinking about what it is that turns us into victims. Why should we, as a population, have all these terrible experiences in common?

I think it comes down to instinct and socialization.

I think the fundamental developmental process that turns someone into nerds is one that makes us favour reason over emotion. Cognition is focused upon and anything that gets int he way of that, like urgent emotional messages from our hearts and our instincts, is aggressively filtered out.

And filtered out at such a deep and fundamental level that we don’t even know we are doing it. So to us, all the vital social information coming at us about what our fellow beach monkeys are doing and thinking is ignored as irrelevant and incomprehensible noise that only makes us feel like we are losing control because those emotions like direct empathy and social IQ threaten to pull us off our icy little intellectual island and throw us into the dark and frightening world of uncontrolled emotion.

I might be overgeneralizing from my own case there, but you get the idea.

All this filtering and suppression of emotion blocks the very signals meant to help us learn how to get along with others, fit in, and develop our social senses.

Thus, we end up lacking the senses (and the sense) to socially compete and find our place in the hierarchy. That automatically puts us at the very bottom of the social totem pole, and we don’t even understand why.

From the point of view of someone high in IQ but lacking social awareness, it seems like people just randomly hate us for no other reason than pure malice.

It’s like a social Dunning Krueger effect. We not only lack the social awareness to avoid being on the lowest in the pecking order, we also lack the social awareness to be able to understand why it’s happening and the part we unwittingly play in it.

The thing is, mundane folk live in a world where they derive steady strength and comfort from the feeling of being part of the tribe. It’s a big part of what lets them relax around one another despite how contentious and cranky humans can be.

But this comfort is like a circuit and people who do not fit in break that circuit, and make the people aware of it instead of enjoying its warmth without thinking about it.

The tribe then has two ways of dealing with a circuit breaker like myself : either bring the person into the circuit or push them out of it.

They will try the first approach first. But if you not only don’t join the circuit but react to it like it’s a foreign entity trying to invade your mind, they can’t help but take that as a rejection of everyone in the circuit and of society itself.

And because we take in information primarily via language, we are left wishing someone would explain all this to us.

But they can’t. They can’t explain it any more than a fish can teach you to swim. It comes naturally to them and few people can articulate something like that.

So one side feels like they are being harshly punished for absolutely no reason, and the other might think it is sad that we’re sad but can’t deny that life is a lot easier without the other side around and so they do nothing while the more active members of this circuit act to protect it.

The only nerd-friendly analogy I can think of is that it’s like when someone shows up to play a tabletop RPG with a mundane spouse or partner. Everything was fine when it was just us nerds but then this person who needs everything explained to them is there and you really wish they would just go away.

And they, of course, feel like they are being picked on for no good reason.

Funny how that works out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m going to talk about it.

However, you will have to forgive me if the language I use to talk about it is uncharacteristically indirect. There are aspects of I would not care to have associated with my name.

Also, it’s about my sex life, and I don’t want to overburden your tolerance levels.

Even an open book like myself has some idea that some things are best left unsaid when speaking to a general audience. If I had my druthers, I would be completely open about everything all the time, and let the chips fall where they may.

That would not, however, be very smart of me. So despite my dreams of being a figure of international controversy, there are some cards I must keep close to my chest.

Or some area near there.

Anyhow. The basic deal is that I have discovered that for a rather old game I have called Skyrim there exists a massive community of people making “mods” (short for modifications, things that alter the game in some way) of a very adult nature, and it has led to me having more fun than I have ever had in my life.

That this coincides with my decision to take the bull by the horns (more on that later) (not really) and get my Secret Informant work done is of absolutely no surprise to me. For my entire life, whenever something big and important and life-changing has come along, it has been accompanied by a very enticing video game of one form or another simply landing in my lap and providing an attractive but ultimately self-destructive distraction right when I need to focus most.

It doesn’t bother me any more. I have come to expect it. I am more amused by it than anything else because at this point in my life, it has little impact. I can still get done what I need to get done and keep my playtime within appropriate limits.

So while this marvelous new world of erotic adventure can be hard to tear myself away from, once I do, I do not crave it or long for it. I know that it is there for me for when I am ready for it. I feel no sense of deprivation or disconnection.

So I don’t need to cling to it like a lifeline. In effect, it is such an effective drug that it satisfies be enough and in such a deep and unprecedented way that I free fairly free of any sort of compulsive need for something to distract me from my pain and/or fill the enormous void that lies in the middle of my soul, where my heart should be.

My heart (and other parts) are right where they need to be and I am, if not exactly blissful, at the very least highly satisfied with my life right now.

I wonder if this is what it is like to be sexually satisfied. I do feel a certain unfamiliar kind of calm equanimity right now.

Life’s pretty decent these days.

Of course, that would not be the case had I not actually buckled down and wrote a third version of the teaser trailer for Secret Informant.

And it sucks. It sucks hard. It’s just as boring and generic as the first two tries. We could probably “get away” with it, but fuck that noise. My dreams cannot be confined to so small a space. I want to make something that stands out from the pack and that showcases my talents. Not some third rate generic trash that could be written by any office drone smart enough to use CeltX.

Luckily, writing Crapsack 3.0 has unblocked my imagination and I am now filled to the brim with amazing ideas about how to make something that will be funny, unique,  and very, very shareable.

OK, maybe the sexual satisfaction had a hand (so to speak) in unblocking my creativity too. So much for asceticism. All those celibates thinking their sexual frustration gets them closer to God.

Only when it is relieved, boys and girls. Only when it is relieved.

Anyhow, whatever the cause, I am running fast and clear now and I just know I will knock out a really bright and funny piece thqat will delight the masses without any need for special effects or expensive production at all.

In fact, rather the opposite. (More on that later) (for real this time)

It’s amazing the effect that turning a game you already love into a sexual wonderland full of magic and wonder and really wild things can do for a fella.

Especially a big ol’ perv like me! It’s a pervert’s paradise out there.

So all in all, my life is qu

And all because of some very hardworking and talented nerds who chose to use their gifts in order to create toys for all the grown up girls and boys to play with and for no other reason than the wanted to make life more fun for others.

Because the kicker to all of this is that all of this stuff is free. It doesn’t even have ads. It’s the sharing economy at its finest. My “all it takes is one nerd” principle exemplified.

God, I love the Internet.

Other than my frisky virtual love life, things have been nicely quiet for me today. Tomorrow will be pleasant but fairly hectic, as Joe is taking me to Mister Big and Tall to get me a summer weight jacket and a nice pair of shorts for my birthday^[1] in the afternoon and then dinner and hanging out with tout la Gang in the evening.

It’s good that all I have toi get done is my blogging. Time would get pretty tight if I also had a episode to write!

So all in all, my life is pretty freaking groovy right now. I am creatively stoked, I have money in the bank, and I even have something a lot like a sex life.

Only without all the hassle of involving other people.

But ya know… baby steps.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Special…. because I love you.

The last little while has been stressful for me because I have had something social for every day of this week except Monday.

Tuesday night I hung out with La Gang as usual for a Tuesday. Fior the uninitiated, La Gang is me, my roommates Joe and Julian (who are a couple), and our friend, the always lovely, always charming Miss Felicity.

Isn’t she great folks? Let’s give her a big round of applause.

I love hanging out and watching things with my friends, but even this most agreeable form of social stimulus drains me somewhat.

That’s what it means to be an introvert, after all.

Wednesday was supposed to be the night Felicity and I would go visit our friend Garth and together we would further develop our project known as Paragon. It’s a show about the cheapest, lowest on the totem pole, most ridiculous paranormal investigation organization in the world that always ends up with the jobs too low paying, too low status. or just too damned stupid for any other agency.

It’s a comedy with dramatic elements. Like Buffy, only made by people Felicity can stand. (She is the opposite of a Whedonite. )

However, Garth bailed on us . That’s getting to be a thing with him. I am not going to put up with it much longer.  I can’t stand that kind of unreliability.

It’s simple, Garth. There is never going to be a time when a visit from us will not seem like work. Like effort. Your introverted side will always push you to cancel, or even pre-cancel, and you will always have to overcome that in order to be sociable and to be part of what goes on in the world. Being alone will always be easier than being with others. So stop pretending it has something to do with circumstances.

Every time I am to go out into the world – every SINGLE fucking time – I have a stab of fear and the strong urge to cancel. Every time, I have to overcome it. And even when I am out and having a good time, there is a part of me that can’t wait to get home and be alone and hide from the world.

But I don’t give in to that shit. Saying no to it is hard at first, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. There will always be a part of you that doesn’t want to be with others and it will do whatever it has to do to get its way.

It is the enemy. You must destroy it.

Anyhow, after Garth bailed on us, Felicity and I decided to just go find someplace to eat and hang out for a while. Which was great.

Thursday was therapy day, and we all know how that went. Then, I hung out with La Gang in the evening, and that took up some spoons. 

Normally, we hang out Friday night, but we moved it to Thursday because of the plans we had for tonight.

Tonight, Felicity had a comedy show to do at the Gallery Gachet in downtown Vancouver. It was a show for Stand Up For Mental Health, an organization that teaches standup comedy to people with mental health issues. She’s a graduate of the program and does shows for them now and then.

So tonight, Joe, Felicity, and I all piled into Joe’s vehicle (it’s Honda Fit, so it defies easy categorization) and drove downtown for the show.

It went well. Felicity was, as always, hilarious and magnetic. After the show we came home, and well, here I am.

As you can see, by my hermit-like standards, it’s been a whirlwind of social engagements. And it’s left me feeling a little dizzy,.

Tomorrow, I have the day off. No episode, no social obligations, just blogging and free time. I could use the break.

But that does not mean tomorrow will not be challenging, because tomorrow is the day that I will finally write that damned thing for Secret Informant. The season trailer script.

I am all out of excuses and I know that until I do it, I will not be free of this black cloud hanging over me. My life is going pretty okay apart from that.

So come hell or high water, I am writing that thing tomorrow, and when it is done, I will be free to enjoy my life again.

And that means I will keep on writing it and polishing it until it is awesome. It’s not going to be a very long script – 2 or 3 pages at the most – and so I will be able to go through as many times as needed to make it something that makes me happy all the way through.

That’s the sum of my editorial process (once I have one) : nothing in the thing that makes me sad.

I will write the thing and it will open the gates to my becoming a better writer.  Editing my own work has been my artistic bête noire for long enough. I am amazingly freaking talented and my work should reflect that.

And that is despite the fact that I know I can get away with doing less. Amazingly, my life still consists of getting away with a halfassed effort. I really thought that, at some point, I would be in a situation that demanded more of me by now.

And hopefully, I will still find it some day. But this ain’t it.

I am still waiting for the test I fail, I suppose. For something that I can only do by really stretching my abilities.

But I am beginning to suspect that it isn’t coming. Everything in my life has been either easy success or total failure. Most of those failures had to do with my poor operational memory. Few of them have been because I just could not do it.

Linguistics class is something I just could not do. I tried real hard, but the information was just coming too fast for this old brain of mine and too many concepts had logical gaps that everyone else seemed to know how to fill in but me.

But what is missing in my life is something I definitely can do, but only if I stretch.

Looks like I will have to do that for myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oy, such a friggin’ day I’ve had so far.

Wait, am I allowed to use both “oy” and “friggin'” in a sentence? Let’s ask the judges.

(Quick cut to the Panel of Jewish Newfies (Jewfies) who all give a thumbs up. )

Phew. Thanks, gentlemen. Mazel tov!

Anyhow, so, today I had therapy. But I am not going to talk about what happened in therapy. Not yet.

First,. I gotta tell you about what happened on the way to therapy.

I leave the apartment with plenty of time to get to our stop in time to catch my bus at 1:13 that would get me to the intersection near my therapist’s office at 1:24 to arrive at my therapist’s office at 1:30, which was the time of my appointment.

And immediately, I am, stopped, because at the intersection of Cook and Cooney, madness and chaos reign.

Well, OK, not madness. and chaos. But the whole intersection is ripped up and surrounded by people wearing hardhats and orange vests, and for a delicate soul like myself, that’s practically the same thing.

First, I try to cross the normal way, but a flagger^[1] stops me, tells me the sidewalk is closed and I have to go around the long way, crossing Cooney, then crossing Cook, then crossing Cooney again just to get to the bus stop.

The bus stop I normally only have to cross Cook once to get to.

So I waste a minute silently fuming before making that insane manuever,.

And by now, of course, I have missed my fucking bus.

So now I am sitting at the bus stop, stressing out because I know I am not going to be on time for my therapy appointment now.

Turns out I didn’t know the half of it.

Another 405 bus finally shows up at around 1:33. I get on, and relax. That was stressful, but at least it’s over. I’m on my way, and that’s what’s important.

So the bus goes up 3 Road, turns onto Lansdowne, and stops. Why?

Because the intersection of Lansdowne and Buswell has ALSO been ripped up, and that forms a bottleneck on Landsdowne by blocking one lane of it.

So now my bus is stuck in line, so to speak, waiting to get through the bottleneck. Every time the light turns green, maybe 3 vehicles get through.

So it takes 15 frigging minutes just to get through that intersection. On a journey that was supposed to take 14 minutes total. And we’re not even a third of the way there.

Long story short (too late), I got to my therapist’s appointment at around 2. When my appointment was at 1:30. And he had another patient after me, so it is not like he could give me any more time.

New patient, too. Saw him on the way out. Seemed like a nervous wreck. Poor guy. I was like him once. Get well soon, dude.

Anyway, that is the saga of my getting to therapy. Now let’s talk about what actually happened there today.

I think the fact that I arrived there a bundle of stress and nerves, plus the fact that I didn’t have a lot of time, actually ended up helping because it made me focus on what I wanted to talk about the most as determined by a quick scan of my psyche for whatever I could think of that had the deepest roots in my psyche.

So I started off talking about my mother. I need to talk about her more because my relationship to her define a lot of what came later in my life.

So I talked about how I grew up in a household that brooked no large displays of emotion. Nobody enforced this. It was part of the culture of the family. Big uncontrolled displays of emotion were something that “just wasn’t done”.

I call that the British Disease. TO lose control and have a big emotional response would be dreadfully embarrassing because the understand baked in to the culture is that people should be more in control of themselves and thus avoid making everyone around them feel awkward, embarrassed, or sad.

Kind of gets in the way of empathy.

Thus, you have a household where any number of intellectually hefty ideas or experiences can be talked about over the dinner table as easily as some families might talk about the weather, but our lack of God forbid that you should cry around others.

Especially if you are male.

When I told my therapist about that, and said that I thought the number one problem for white males was emotional constipation, he said “But you’re not emotionally constipated, are you?”

Seems he had forgotten that how I behave with him is not how I behave in the world. With him, I am as emotionally open as I know how to be. But that’s nothing liek how I am out in the world, with my social mask firmly in place.

In the real world, I always feel like people are barely tolerating me, so the last thing I would do is share anything dark or deep that might make people sad or upset. That would be asking far too much of people and they would drop me like I was live plutonium and I would be all alone again.

Instead I try to be funny and interesting so people will stay around.

My brother, out of the blue, texted me to say he loved and missed me. I, of course, replied in kind. But it really got me to thinking about this negativity of mine.

And the madness.

Because despite overwhelming evidence. I still find it very hard to believe that anyone actually wants me around. That my presence means something to them and has value.

That I am not a liability to all.

I learned of my worthlessness and how unwelcome I am on the planet at too early an age for it to be changed by mere facts.

It’s going to take a long time and a lot of work before I am out from under that.

No wonder it’s so hard for me to feel love.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to it.

Not really. I am just feeling cranky and somewhat nihilistic from all the fucking sleeping I have been doing lately. I feel like I am fighting an invisible enemy just to type in a few measly words before picking up where I left off in my coma.

I probably should not use that term so lightly, but fuck it.

I just want to feel awake and alive. I am frustrated by my lack of productive hours and my inability to focus. Caffeine doesn’t help much. I drink my diet cola and I can feel the caff trying to perk me up, but it’s like a picket fence trying to hold back the avalanche of my sleepiness. It gets crushed without appreciable effect.

Not that the sleep itself is all that bad. At least, not lately. I am not retaining any memory of my dreams. That doesn’t mean I am not having any, of course. Without dreaming, our minds disintegrate as our medium term memory gets more and more overloaded. There

are a few (thankfully rare) brain disorders that cause people to lose the ability to dream, and the outlook for those poor souls is pretty grim.

So no, I dream, as must we all. But I don’t remember them.

I resent that a tiny bit. I want to know and remember my dreams. I want to be able to really deeply contemplate them, and by so doing perhaps gain insight into what the dream was “trying to tell me”.

That is merely a metaphor, of course. Dreams are not truly trying to tell you anything. They are merely the product of the mind’s internal processes. Like I said before, dreams are how our mind deals with complex and emotion-laden emotions that can’t be properly processed with only the resources of the unconscious mind. So the conscious mind is awoken and whatever needs to happen in order to get the job done happens.

And then you can slip back into unconsciousness.

However, it is useful to think of dreams having some kind of message for us because often their content points to what issues we are having in life and when properly interpreted can yield significant psychological insight.

So hard to stay awake.

I suppose it’s possible that my sleep aids, trazadone and quetiapine, might be somewhat you blame for my somnolence. Historically, I have found that while sleeping pills may or may not help me get to sleep, they invariably make it hard for me to wake the fuck up when I want to do so.

So part of it could be that, plus the sleep apnea of course. And lurking in the background is the escapist part of my mind that uses sleep as a way to avoid having to deal with reality.

In  that, it is the ultimate form of procrastination. You are essentially putting off dealing with reality itself.. And that’s not always a bad thing. .

It’s just that there’s so much to do, and I’m tired of sleeping.

Heat death, part 2 of 2.

I wonder sometimes if I will ever break the glass wall that isolates me from others.

The problem is that it was installed when I was very young. Either when I was raped at 3, or that awful day that I got bullied on the way to school and realized that I wasn’t safe anywhere except when I was home.

Hello agoraphobia. You’re new here, aren’t you?

Whenever it was that it started, it’s been a deep and fundamental part of me for so long that when I try to imagine it not being there, I feel intense anxiety bordering on the existential. It is the Thing Most Dreaded. It is the Ultimate Exposure.

Hmmm. I am going to stop with the using capitals like that. I have a deep down feeling that using capitals like that is the first step on the road to Crazytown.

Anyhow, as much as I dread that wall not being there, I also hate the fucking thing and want it gone, because it’s one of the main things fucking up my life. It’s what keeps me from being able to be relaxed and natural around people. It’s what keeps me in the dark and the cold, far away from the world of the living. It’s the infection that makes me come across as weird and sick to others, even though I try so hard to be liked.

It’s the reason for my inability to really sync up with most people.

And some of it, I must admit, is the intelligence gap. But I refuse to believe that is insurmountable. There must be a way for me to  learn how to converse and connect with people who aren’t on my level.

But that’s a topic for another day.

Maybe the secret to overcoming this wall of mine is a little old fashioned age regression. Not to the point of active delusion, obviously. I am not going to start going around believing I really am three again.

That would be a horrible sight to behold and disturbing as fuck, frankly.

No. I am talking more of a social regression to a state of mind where I have no preconceived notions about how to interact with people and what I can expect from others, and rebuild myself from there,. minus all the ghosts inside my haunted head.

Take everything at face value, and approach things with the innocent affability I used to have when I was a wee sprog. Peel back all those layers of fear and distrust and paranoia and try to learn to just… be me.

It’s a tall order. Ironically, it will take a lot of work to get back to being simple.

Or maybe it won’t. Maybe I just have to imagine it then cling to that thought until it becomes a part of me.

I am not some fractured creature.
I am not a heartsick boy.

I’m brand new, and I don’t have to own my past at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

After all my big talk, I still haven’t even started on my Secret Informant script.

It is slightly a matter of time management, but not really, because I have still been playing video games for hours and hours. I could have spent some of those hours getting my god damned work done. But no.

I really feel like this is something that will make or break me. Either I will get the thing done and redeem myself, or I will flame out and end up hating myself hard.

Everyone’s been so nice to me. I would hate to let them down.

But that’s not really what this is about, is it? It’s about self-discipline. It’s about doing that which frightens and challenges me. It’s about shutting down the part of my mind that procrastinates and prevaricates, dawdles and foot-drags, comes up with bullshit excuses as to why I can’t do it right now and then makes even more specious plans to do it later.

I don’t know what I am so afraid of. I know I can do a decent enough job. I don’t know why I can write an entirely original animation script every day yet this is freaking me out. I don’t know why this thing became such a… thing.

Perhaps it’s the uncertainty. I don’t get a lot of input as to what the script should be. That, plus the whole “so many people are depending on me” pressure bullshit.

That’s something I did not learn about in school – what to do when you are left entirely on your own to come up with whatever you can. I always assumed that I would be struggling to meet a certain standard as defined by my employer, even if that standards was simply “This is not good enough yet. ”

But no. In both SI and the animation gig, I am on my own. Nobody else involved really “gets” writing and that means that whatever I write, that’s what will be made.

I really thought there would be people to filter me.

But that’s the story of my life, really. No guidance. No advice. No input. No structure. Just me, on my own, doing what I can and hoping I am doing it right. But never sure.

This is what happens when a child is left to raise themselves. When you have an eerily silent childhood, with nobody else’s voice but your own to guide you.

I would go to school by myself, do the work by myself, eat lunch by myself, walk home by myself, watch TV by myself, then put myself to bed.

And so I grew up with this intense feeling of abandonment. True, I had not been physically abandoned or neglected. I had more than enough to eat, a place to sleep, an allowance to use for discretionary spending, clothes, school supplies, you name it.

But emotionally, I was utterly abandoned. Nobody looked after me. It was do it myself or it doesn’t get done.

That’s not how elementary school is supposed to go.

Meanwhile, after going back to sleep, waking up feeling awful, eating lunch, taking a pee, and finally getting back to the computer 45 minutes later…

Enough self-pity. It serves a purpose when I write it down because it helps me mourn for myself, so to speak. It sounds crazy but that’s an important step in recovery.

You’re not exactly mourning the person you might have been without all the damage and pain. That’s almost it, but not quite. It’s more like you are mourning for the pain and humiliation itself, because as they have become a part of you, so must they be mourned as they go away.

Still pretty sleepy. I hope this sleepy shit doesn’t last too much longer. I feel so frustrated. There’s things I need to get done but I end up sleeping instead.

Hmmm. Disturbing thought.  What if my subconscious mind is surreptitiously generating this sleepiness in order to keep me from dealing with my problems? I sure hope that is not it. I have been the victim of my own psychosomatic delusions before, so it is not entirely out of the question.

Well whatever the source, I wish I could just shake it off and get on with things. But it enforces itself quite effectively. It’s hard to just “get it done” when you are so tired and dizzy that you can barely focus on the screen and keep falling asleep at the keys.

Then you have no chance but the surrender and go back to fucking bed, and hope that you will be more coherent and focused the next time.

Aaand I just fell asleep for a couple of seconds. Oy.

Sooner or later, ill write that script for SI. And when I do, I bet I will end up wondering what all the fuss was about.

That’s too narrow a view, however. It will only seem like there was too much of a fuss if I do the emotional work to get myself to that point. Ergo, it would be an egregious fallacy to imagine that I could have skipped the whole thing and gone straight to the end result. That’s just plain not how things work.

Crossing the finish line after a marathon does not imply that you could have gone straight to the finish line and saved yourself a lot of wear and tear.

That’s a pathetic fantasy of the ego, that if you know the answer you get to skip the hard or boring parts of life.

Slept a bit again.

I still have a lot of growing up to do. And like someone once said, “growing up is like the German measles – the older you are when it happens, the more painful it is. ”

And the less sympathetic people are to your struggles.

They’s not sympathetic because you’re so pathetic… and that’s the bottom line.

Oh well, back to the sandman’s sand mine. I still have my episode to write today, so I hope I will not sleep for too long.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God damn I am getting sick of this.

I have been so damned sleepy lately. I sleep all through the morning and into the afternoon as well. Then when I AM (techincally) awake, I am strung out and incoherent due to both the heat and whatever it was that was making me so sleepy in the first place. So it’s still a struggle to get anything done.

Right now, I am the most coherent I have been since going to sleep last night, and I am still struggling to keep my eyes focused. I feel lightheaded and floaty. I am weaving slightly in my chair. My fingers are tingling.

Anyone got an oxygen tent I can borrow for a couple of decades?

There are things I would rather be doing than sitting here in a stupor as I do my best to type coherent sentences. Like getting my Secret Informant work done, for starters. I plan on sitting myself here in front of the computer with absolutely no programs running except for CeltX (screenwriting program) and staring at the blank screen until something comes to me about how to make the teaser trailer for Secret Informant more fun and funny and cool.

Thus, I plan to harness the power of boredom to haul myself over the jagged ragged rocks of my mental health issues so I can finally get down to business and rock the world instead of being trapped in anxiety, indecision, and self-loathing.

I’m pretty fucking sick of that, too.

And over all this lies a thick heavy blanket pushing my down, down, down. I feel like gravity on me has doubled and the air pressure has tripled. My head hurts and my sinuses ache, and I feel this knot of pressure just above the bridge of my nose that makes me feel like my nose is going to pop off my body like in a cartoon any second now. Along with my eyeballs,. maybe.

In short, I am not at all well.

Oh, and that terrible cycle of waking up with a very full bladder and a ravenous appetite every 80 minutes is back. It’s very stressful. So not only have I been rendered utterly incoherent and been barely able to stagger to the bathroom and back in order to get abnother 80 mins of sleep, I have been growling-coyote hungry the whole time too.

It’s very hard on the nerves.

At least I know that, in time, this will clear. Enough of this deep sea diving naps and I will fulfill whatever need they meet and I will be released unto the world like an animal raised  by humans that is suddenly released into its “native” environment as part of a well meaning yet horrible cruel repopulation program.

I mean, we humans have a native habitat too, someone in the Olduvai Gorge in Africa, but few of us would do too well if we were “released” back into it.

Instincts can only take you so far. After that, you have to know things.

I am trying to keep up. I did manage to eat lunch, yay that, and I have been hydrated fairly well. As much as being sweaty sucks, it is far worse to need to sweat but nothing is coming out. Either because my pores are clogged, or I am dehydrated, or both.

That’s when heat sickness happens. I know that much. When my body can’t shed enough heat for homeostasis, my temperature goes up and, naturally, I get sick.

We mammals only function well within a very narrow internal temperature range. It’s the range needed for our high performance metabolisms to function. Anything above or below that and things break down.

Trust me, I know this from experience.

So I dunno. I hope this bullshit works itself out soon because I am trying hard to get back to some kind of happy state where I feel confident and strong and ready to take on the world with one hand tied behind my back.

Right now, I barely feel ready to conquer gravity enough to go back to bed.

And now I have had another round of napping and whatnot. I am cautiously optimistic. I feel a fair bit better now. I might need one more nap some time tonight in order to get truly clear of this quagmire, but I am at least confident that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a train now.

I can only assume that I need such quantity of sleep because of its poor quality. My brain needs all this sleep in order to get through all the dreaming it needs to do.

And by “dreaming”, I of course mean “processing the contents of my medium term memory so they can be stored in long term memory”.

It’s more or less a lossy compression routine.

I guess I am doomed to have these sleepy days. At least until I get a handle on my sleep apnea. I keep telling myself that I will give CPAP another try, but I never seem to get around to it.

Because it’s hard. And it is always so much easier to NOT do things, and forget about them for a while, and just keep on like I have been keeping on.

Easy… and deadly. After all, that’s what I was doing for those twenty years of oblivion. Just floating from day to day, letting the time flow by, never thinking about the future, just making it through the day with all my distractions. When I tried to think about the future, a black nihilistic terror gripped me, so I just…. didn’t.

Thank goodness I eventually got into individual therapy.

In fact, I wish I had done it a decade earlier, but the sad truth is that if your illn ess makes it hard to advocate for yourself, you are pretty much fucked.

There is nobody whose job is to look in on you and make sure you are OK and persist till they find out the truth then make you do the right thing.

All that is up to you.

And if you can’t, well….. nobody cares.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still trying to clear that creative jam inside me, so here’s the next bucket of unprocess emotion for me to run through the smelter.

Full disclosure : Smelter is a cool word.

Been feeling kind of wretched lately. Feeling poisoned, which is a feeling I know well. I feel toxic and gross and like I need a good full body cleanse to full out all the old gunk and deadwood so I can breathe free for a change.

And I have plenty going on to make me sick. Like my sleep apnea, which is completely untreated, and mt diabetes, which is half (ass) treated.

And I feel so damned tired lately. That’s probably due to the apnea. Funny how smothering in your sleep and having your blood oxygen level plummet and having your lung capacity go down that really makes a fella feel run down.

Weird, but true.

I could go on and on about how bad I am at taking care of myself, but what’s the point? It’s not going to help. I just have to accept that I am a very ill person and the illnesses make it hard to look after myself and that makes the illnesses worse.

I think I underestimate just how fragile I am a lot of the time. I have talked before about how some things are very hard ro me to do and I can’t explain why, so I can’t justify it or make people understand it. I have no choice but to ask people to take my word for it, and show me some mercy as well as the understanding that mental illness makes my world very different than their world and so they should take that into consideration.

I mean, I’m disabled, for fuck’s sake.

But until just now, I have never pondered turning that level of forgiveness on myself. Of telling myself that I get by however I get by with what I have and that’s all I can ever do. Life has dealt me a pretty lousy hand and all I can do is play my cards the best that I can. And that means forgiving myself for being imperfect.

And it’s not like berating myself over my flaws is going to do any good. Quite the opposite, really. The more I do it,. the more I destroy myself inside and the harder it gets to do things right, which leads to still more excoriation of self, and so forth and so on till I have chewed myself down to my current pathetic state.

See, even in trying to talk myself out of my self-destructive patterns, I end up criticizing myself at the end of the paragraph. It’s like a kind of sick, sick addiction to self-destruction. Like I am addicted to the taste of my own flesh.

And to go even deeper, I think this self-destruction also serves the more sinister purpose of destroying any solid structure I try to construct inside me.  There is a side of me that wants order and structure in this flaming maelstrom of a mind, but it is overruled by the very deep and maniacal fear of being caught in the wrong “shape” when a crisis happens and not being able to shift to a form that is right for the situation. That side compels me to maximize flexibility at all times regardless of how much it costs me

I know that all sounds fairly crazy. But it’s how things work for me. My fear of being “trapped” is so strong that it demands I remain in a liquid state, as if Odo from Deep Space Nine got so frightened by something that he just stayed in his bucket most of the time, emerging only in a very fluid, shapeless form, ready to go back to the bucket at the slightest fright.

And the thing is, this formlessness inside me is what lets me be so creative. I can take numerous and splendiforous forms and make all kinds of connections that are a lot less than obvious to others. It serves my powerful intellect as well, because it lets me do my “open the lock by oozing into the lock and turning part of myself into the key” trick.

I know that’s not the easiest explanation to grasp, but the sad truth is, it’s the best one I have come up with yet.

But the second I have done one of my tricks, I go right back to being fluid. No structure remains because of that rabid animal fear of being committed to the wrong shape. The side of me that loves to build sandcastles is constantly having those sandcastles washed away by the crashing waves.

Clearly, the root of my problem is this deep and terrible fear of being in the wrong shape. I have to talk it down out of its tree and calm it down and tell it that because its so flexible. it can afford to let structure remain, because it can always pull it down when the time comes.

And, on the negative side of things, that personal growth is meaningless if it is impermanent. I am going to have to accept some inner structure if I want to be a stronger and more confident person. My soul is badly in need of some kind of skeleton to give it form and structure and support.

Being goo gets real fucking old after a while, know what I mean?

Besides, what about being trapped in formlessness? The very fact that I can’t hold any particular form for very long is a limitation in and of itself. What if a situation comes along that requires holding the same shape for a long time? What then?

I realize now that I tend to think of my formless nature as being my ultimate strength. I can handle anything by changing into the right form…. right? It’s like the ultimate superpower. I can be Superman, the Flash, or Wolverine whenever I like. Right?

No, not really. I can take on some of their attributes, but it’s still just a half-assed replica made of goo. It’s more illusion that reality and it might convince others of my amazingness, but it shouldn’t fool me.

And to be honest, most of the time it doesn’t fool them, either.

And yet, I can’t envision a more structured life. Or at least, I can’t envision one where all the structure has to be self-generated.

That’s just plain never going to work for me. The best I can hope for is to go somewhere that will give me the structure I need, like school did.

I really do dream of a life where someone says “Do this!” and I do that, and I am then told “Good work!! Here’s the next thing…. “.

And that seems really…. doable. right?

All I need to do is get a goddamned job.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.