An amazing thing happened today.

I actually slept for eight hours.

In a row, even.

I went to bed around 6 am, and woke up just before 2 pm . That NEVER happens. Even with the aid of my sleeping pills, I never get more than 5 hours of sleep.

And the fact is, I am still sleepy. If it wasn’t for needing to eat, I might have gone right back to sleep after I took a leak at that point.

Drat those pesky concerns like actually wanting to do something with my day and the sure and swift knowledge that going to sleep when you haven’t eaten in  10 hours is a Very Bad Thing if you are a type 2 diabetic like me.,

And here I am a couple hours later. Normally, I would tough it out and not sleep until I had finished what I had started.

But I was so sleepy that not only did I keep falling asleep for a few seconds, I started to slide out of my chair when ti happened, and so I figured I had better get some damned sleep before I hurt myself.

That brings the total hours I have slept today up to ten, which pleases me. I’m proud of it. It feels like I accomplished something.

That’s how low the bar is for me, dear readers. Sleeping a lot is now victory.

I think I am past the worst of the fever-dream that was/is my Skyrim modding obsession,. I am still enjoying it quite a bit, but I don’t feel as driven to do it as I did.

Turns out the secret was to finally masturbate to completion. Who knew.

I feel pretty weird about the whole thing, to be honest. I am pretty sure I will look back on this odd period of my life as something that feels like it happened to someone else. Someone who I know intimately, but who isn’t really me.

Kind of like how, in dreams, I am very rarely actually myself, Michael John Bertrand, the dude what is typing at you right now, who grew up in Summerside and went to Three Oaks Senior High (go, the TOSH Whatevers!), and has friends and siblings and such.

And yet, it’s still me. The core me, the thing that is me, the true self. My core self. The me that is left over if you subtract all the normal things we use to identify ourselves.

The person I would be if I had no idea who I was.

One of the things that struck me about V, the protagonist in the movie V for Vendetta, is that he emerged from the burning wreckage of some secret government facility with total amnesia. Had no idea what or who he was. Tabula rasa.

And the weird thing is…. I envy him. Because he got to decide who he was from that point on. He could construct an identity entirely consistent with his true self and thus become a highly actualized individual.

What enormous freedom that represented. To be free of all arbitrary contexts such as personal history and accidents of birth, and be free to develop oneself unhindered by the accumulated refuse of life.

I realize how bizarre that sounds. It makes me sound like some kind of chilly alien sociopath. Well, I am certifiably insane, and have the medications to prove it. I often talk about the profound coldness within me in this space, but so far I have mostly kept its manifestations to myself. This is one of them.

In fact, the degree to which I identify with V frightens me. The fact that he (spoiler alert) does that whole fucked up thing of keeping the true protagonist, the girl, hostage and making her think she had been captured by the evil government and torturing her until she finally breaks and screams she’s not afraid any more – and the fact that he did it because she said she wanted to be free of her fear – makes total sense to me.

I’m not saying it was a good thing to do or that it was justified or anything. V is a monster in many ways. She was right to get super pissed at him.

But it is exactly the sort of thing I would do if something happened to me that made me lose my mind to an unprecedented degree. I would do it out of love, knowing the person would hate me for it, I’d be willing to make that sacrifice if that’s what it took to free them from their pain.

As you can see in the movie. that’s not exactly how it turned out. He might have extinguished her fears but it’s hard to say she was better off for it.

I also identify with his total rage at the horrible goddamned government and greatly admire the tenacity, intelligence, creativity, and above all tightly focused drive I would feel the same way about a government like that – we all would – but I doubt I would be able to turn that rage into action so effectively.

I’d want to do so. Like him, I would plot and scheme to destroy the system. I could do little else. I would feel, like Adrian Veidt did in that other Alan Moore story Watchmen, that I was quite possibly the only person who could do it, but definitely that I had to try.

And probably die in the process. But it would be the only way I could live with myself. I am well aware of the power that comes with my particular form of intelligence. The INTJ power to plot, scheme, maneuver, and execute a long term plan with many factors and moving parts and unbounded variables.

It’s the power of strategy, and if you have it and you know it – and you have a conscience and feel an deep and abiding need to live consistent to it – then you have no choice but to fight back however you can.

You know you can.

So you must.

That’s just how it works with me.

Now if only my life had as clear and unmistakable a group of villains as V does.

Then you’d really see some shit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.