I’ve had a rough 14 hours since midnight-ish last night.

I tried to get to sleep. But I had one of my bouts of benign insomnia. Benign in the sense that I am not. thank goodness, lying there miserable, incredibly sleepy but unable to sleep, feeling squashed flat between  tiredness and insomnia like a microorganism  on a microscope slide.

Been there. It’s the most miserable I have ever been without being physically ill. I freak out when I can’t think right. I need to be able to think clearly or panic sets in.

Shows how cerebral I am, I suppose. Some people might enjoy a bout of temporary stupidity. Me, I go straight to maximum panic.

By contrast, the benign  version of my insomnia merely makes me incapable of sleep. It’s always the same. I am almost asleep when I get a brief flash of something like vertigo and then I am wide awake and feeling great.

But great in a kind of manic way. Part of me feels calm and confident and ready to take on the world. But another part is screaming because it feels like it’s trapped in an out of control train car that also happens to be on fire.

I’d planned to get to bed earlier than usual so I could be up at nine (which is when I thought the eclipse would happen at that time) and experience this amazing, once in a lifetime event with the rest of the Northern Hemisphere

But I could not get to sleep. I suppose my body was rebelling at going to be “early”, as opposed to my usual 7 freaking am.

It’s a sickness, this Skyrim thing.

The next thing I know, it’s seven in the morning. So, being in a wonderfully effective state of mind to make sound decisions, I decide I am just going to stay up till noon so I can watch the eclipse and finally fucking participate in something instead of having the whole of life’s parade passing before me without me even able to watch.

And marching in it? Forget about it.

So there I was, sitting at this computer like I do, looking out the window in front of me, waiting for the dimming of the light to signal it was eclipse time and therefore time to get out on the balcony or, if necessary, go down to street level.

But it never happened. It got slightly dimmer, and I got excited. Then it stayed that way for a while. Then it brightened up again.

I must admit, I was expecting something far more dramatic. Sometime along the lines of day turning into night for a little while. Birds getting confused. I thought it would get markedly darker on its way to the 80 percent of totality predicted and I would get to witness the sort of thing that made and broke religions in olden days.

Weird shit happening to the sky can do that to people.

But nope. And I am wondering how the fuck I managed to fuck something like this up.

In retrospect, I wish I had just gone outside at 9 pm and stayed out there until I’d seen the whole show (without looking directly at the sun, of course).

But no, my suicidal paradoxical confidence convinced me I could play Skyrim until the show started and THEN go take a look.

Maybe my window faces the wrong way. I don’t know..

To top it all off, I am constipated. Maybe it’s the stress, I don’t know. It’s not a severe case, not yet, but as a long time irritable bowl syndrome (IBS) sufferer, I have to pay close attention to this kind of thing to make sure I don’t end up in The Bad Place.

In other news, I may be finally getting sick of Skyrim. There is still tons and tons of content out there that I have not explored, but I find myself less and less motivated to try. Playing feels more like a hollow compulsion than a joy lately.

But I am not willing to let go just yet. Soon, but not yet. I still have a lot of fun for a lot of my time playing. But at the same time, this anxiety and restlessness when I play has been building in me for a long time now.

What i really need is some exercise. I know this. I have been building up physical tension and agitation for a while, and it’s not just sexual frustration. I think I am going through a period where the volume is rising on my emotions and it means that even when seemingly peacefully working at the computer, I am experiencing strong emotions that lack anything like efficient release.

Yet still. my depression balks at the very concept of voluntary exercise.

Stupid self-destructive oral retentive depression! Exercise is not the enemy. The idea is not to do as little as possible. Where does that end? Is my life goal really to be able to lie down and have everything that I want brought to me for the rest of my life?

No! I want to go out there and engage with the damned world. It’s just that this disease I have, depression, is still holding me back. Once I get rid of it, I will be able to go out there and find my place in the world.

Or at least get classier and better paying freelance work!

I have decided that when I have done 60 scripts for Prasad, I will ask for a raise from $10 USD a script to $12.50 USD a  script.

That would bring me an extra $50 USD a month, or around $62 Canadian.

I figure I have earned a raise. I mean, sixty scripts, all on time and damn funny.  Granted, they are only between 2 and 5 minutes long, but those are the specs and I think the most important thing is that I have demonstrated that I can produce quality work reliably and on a five days a week schedule.

That will make me a more attractive candidate for further work, should Prasad turn down my demand for a raise.

I will have to harden my heart before I ask, though, because I know I am prone to capitulating due to guilt or a desire not to hurt people or seem like a prick.

A freelancer like me can’t afford to be so squishy. I have a career to think about. I want to climb the Upwork hierarchy. That necessitates the possibility of moving on.

If I do end up parting ways with Prasad, I will give him my “two weeks’ notice” : two more weeks of scripts, maybe three to make it 75.

It’s time to grow up and start pursuing my own interests instead of being a pass bag of goo with no drive or direction of my own.

Drifting can be nice but steering gets you places.

Time to grab the tiller, start the motor, and see where this river goes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

w “post-prandial” sounds dirty, but rest assured, it just means “after a meal”.

But don’t worry. The dirty stuff comes later.

Took a nap after lunch, even though I should know by now that doing so is a very bad idea. Whenever I do that, I end up having the un-fun troubled tortured kind of sleep that leads to my waking up sweaty, dizzy, disoriented, disgruntled^[1], and depressed.

The truth is, I never know when to sleep. In my “waking” hours I almost always feel a little sleepy (yay untreated sleep apnea) and theoretically, I could sleep at any time.

In fact, sometimes it feels like I could sleep for a year and still want more.

But that’s no good. I tried sleeping until I am no longer sleepy, and all it lead to was my wasting 12 hours out of 16 for a day and not getting any further ahead in the game.

Not that it never works. There’s been a few times where I did, indeed, catch up on my sleep and reach a point where I no longer felt sleepy.

But I still felt like crap. So, at best a partial victory.

It’s funny. Right now I have two contradictory thoughts (out of many) in my head : “I really shouldn’t sleep in the afternoon” and “god I want to go back to sleep!”.

Then again, I think we all have a spotty track record when it comes to doing what we know we shouldn’t do.

So maybe I will get a little more sleep this afternoon.

But not until I am finished blogging!

The words, as you might expect from my discombobulated (what a fun word) mental state, are not coming easy right now. I definitely feel like I am trying to swim upstream just trying to articulate my thoughts.

I wish the caffeine from my diet cola would kick in and chase the cobwebs away.

Speaking of which, I am increasingly certain that I have developed a caffeine addiction. The latest evidence occurred last night, when I was quite tired but wanted to keep playing Skyrim, plus I was feeling snacky, so I had some of the pizza I ordered last night along with my usual liter or so of diet cola.

And wow, suddenly I felt great.  Not sleepy at all, full of confidence and joie de vive, ready to take on the world, or at least Tamriel. ^[1]

That’s just the latest evidence, however, and as a data point, it’s weak. The main body of evidence is as simple as it is convincing : I’ve started to crave diet cola.

And not just a little. When the craving hits me, diet cola seems like the most wonderful and delicious beverage in the world. I practically drool for it. Coke ads from the 80’s don’t picture Diet Coke as looking as good as it seems to me when I crave it.

That’s as sure a sign of addiction as I can think of : fetishizing the object of addiction. That’s why pot-heads buy so much pot merch.

Right now, the cravings are relatively harmless because I rarely act on them and as a result they do not happen often. Instead of acting on them, I redirect that energy into happily anticipating the next meal which, as part of my usual routine, will feature that sweet, life-giving diet cola.;

And as addictions go, it’s pretty benign.

And common. In becoming hooked on caffeine, I am merely joining the rest of humanity. Whether via coffee, tea, or cola, the whole world uses and enjoys their caffeine. It’s the heart’s blood of the world. If all the caffeine in the world disappeared one day, civilization would collapse as millions of angry, sleepy people confusedly riot in ther streets and Starbucks franchise owners worldwide have to flee for their lives.

So in reality, all that has happened is that I have joined the rest of the human race.

The addiction would explain why I have felt so anxious, tense, and irritable lately. I am always in a state of either caffeine withdrawal, which makes it hard to think or stay focused so I have to, as I said earlier, “swim upstream” to get anything done, or I have the caffeine in my bloodstream and that builds up a lot of energy that is definitely not all absorbed by playing Skyrim, and the excess turns into free floating anxiety.

Then again, maybe I just need to masturbate. ^[3] I haven’t done so in weeks, which is bad enough. But in those weeks, I have been stimulating myself via erotic Skyrim activity of all sorts, and thus, shall we say, turning up the pressure.

The thing is, I don’t feel horny. It’s not like hunger or thirst or the need to use the bathroom, where the body clearly signals what I need. My body isn’t saying anything.

Whether or not that is caused by my antidepressants or my simply being so out of touch with my primal emotions that they could have moved to the Moon and I wouldn’t know,. is a matter open for debate.

We could even have a mass debate.

Instead of any actual drive towards sexual release, all I have is the dull ache in my testicles that nearly all men are familiar with and which I easily ignore most of the time.

And then, clueless and disconnected as I am, I end up wondering why my balls “suddenly” hurt and make me a little queasy.

It’s because the balls are stupid and keep making sperm whether it’s getting released or not, dumbass. Take care of it!

Then again, I am a dude who can get so into a game he is playing that he forgets to eat, so I suppose my sexual dereliction is to be expected.

It’s like me and my body barely know each other. I’d be a lot happier if I learned to take care of myself properly. And I am working on it.

I just hope I don’t fall apart before I get there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[2]] That’s the name of the world (or possibly the country)  which contains the province of Skyrim, which is where the game of the same name takes place. [[2]]

Wow, I think this may be the first time in history that I had a brilliant idea for a blog topic before it was too late because I had already written the damn thing.

The best ideas seem to come to me in the time between 7 pm and 8 pm. My power hour, I guess. Something to think about in the future.

Anyhow. What I want to talk about tonight is a revelation I had not half an hour ago about myself and what I want to do to make myself more comfortable in my own skin.

Other people’s skin never fits me.

It was a double barrel revelation,two insights that happened as one.

First off, I realized that a lot of my negative self-talk revolves around my lapses in memory, clumsiness, and general cluelessness. My inner prosecutor loves that stuff.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. That was the other barrel of the revelation. There’s a completely different way of looking at things that is much kinder and less malign version than my usual self-loathing.

I’m not a total loser that sucks at life and therefore sucks in general.

I’m a hilarious sitcom sidekick! I am that lovable goof Michael, the nerdy friend of the main young male character. Let’s call him Tad.

Tad : Well yeah, he’s brilliant. He gets straight As without even studying. He knows more about everything than I know about anything. But boy, that kid needs a minder. Always walking around with his head in the clouds, thinking the big thoughts, not really paying attention to reality it all.  I’ve had to stop him from walking into traffic like a dozen times and I’ve only known him for six months!

Tad’s Dad : (nods) A wise man once said that “those who live with their head in the clouds are at the mercy of the puddles in the road. “

Tad : Exactly! And he’s always forgetting things. Things nobody should forget. Like his own phone number! Or what class he’s in. Things like that.

Tad’s Dad : You know what I think?

Tad : No, what?

Tad’s Dad : That he’s awfully lucky to have a good friend like you looking out for him.

Tad  : (blushing but pleased) Aww, DAD!

Tad : By the way, who was the wise man who said that stuff about the puddles?

Tad’s Dad : Me. Just now. You were here.

Tad : (eyerolls) By which you mean you don’t remember.

Tad’s Dad : Give that man a cigar!

Tad laughs, pleased with himself.

Tad’s Dad : Only not really, because you know how we feel about the tobacco industry.

Tad : (eyeroll)  Yeah, I kind of figured that out by myself.

That’s an excerpt from my never before released pilot. “Brad and his Dad”. Watch for it this fall on nothing!

Actually, as I wrote that, I noticed three things :

1. That was a lot of fun to write
2. And also easy. Almost like I should be writing this kind of thing for a living. I wonder if there’s a school that helps you with that… 😛
3. At some point, in the back of my mind, I started writing it with Family Ties in mind. Michael J. Fox as Brad, Stephen Gross as his Dad. Guess I really do have sitcoms burned deep into my mind!

Anyhow^[1], back to the point I am almost positive I was trying to make. By simply re-imagining myself as a  goofy but lovable sitcom character, I can access deep, powerful symbols in my mind and use them to defeat my inner prosecutor.

Because seriously…. fuck that guy.

This might seem like a very strange form of therapy to someone who doesn’t know me very well. But for me, therapy is all about the re-imagining. What one of my favorite poets., MC 900 Foot Jesus, called “dreaming it anew”.

If I can come up with a better dream of myself, a new and superior dream that better solves the problem of myself, then I can become that dream.

That’s one of my most extraordinary powers.

It’s also extraordinarily dangerous.

These revelations also fit with my recent thoughts about the scrappy underdog archetype, and what makes it work.

So far, it goes like this :

People don’t need you to succeed. They just need to see you trying as hard as you can. As long as you can do that, people will love and even protect you.

I learned this lesson from a show called Dirty Jobs, hosted by Mike Rowe. Every episode, he showed up at a work site for some crazy awful job, try his absolute best to do the job while all the workers were watching, fail miserably, and after that, they all loved him like a brother.

In Machiavellian terms, it’s brilliant, because by trying as hard as he can but failing, he gained the workers at the site’s respect while also establishing that he is both a regular, relatable, working-class kind of guy and yet, absolutely no threat to anyone’s position in the existing hierarchy.

All you gotta do is try.

I wish I had known that when I was being such a little shit^[2] in gym class as a kid. I would have been way better behaved. I gave gym teachers such a hard time when they were just regular people trying to do their jobs, too.

If I had known the secret was to try as hard as you can, I would have tried as hard as I could, and maybe my fellow students would have liked me more.

This new idea runs contrary to my inner oddsmaker slash accountant, who enforces a very strict effort versus reward on every possibly action, and insists that only things with a good chance of immediate, tangible rewards.

And, I hasten to add, was an ironically detached little shit even back then.

That one lesson about trying could have saved me a lot of pain and isolation.

In fact, with that one lesson plus a clue update about trying to fit in being toally worth it sometimes, and I would have had an entirely different childhood.
I will talk to you nice people again.

I’ll be talking about my Skyrim adventures today. So if that’s something you find very dull, I apologize. But it’s what’s on my mind right now.

“Beat” the game with my Argonian (scaly lizard dude) character, Monstrum et Facie. ^[1] We’ll call him Monty for short. ^[2]

I’d forgotten how arduous the final section of the game was. There’s some extremely tough enemies there. It’s a bit of a shock because by the time you get there, your character is extremely powerful and most enemies are laughably easy to dispose of because while you have gotten stronger, they have stayed the same.

But not the zombies and skeletons in the second-last phase of the game. Their power is defined relative to yours, and therefore no matter how powerful you get, they are just as tough to beat.

And I approve of this. You don’t want the run-up to the final showdown with the game’s big bad, the dragon Alduin, Eater of Worlds, to be something the player character can just breeze through casually.

That might be easier, but it would be less fun and make the ending less satisfying.

Instead, I found myself having to fight as hard as I did at the beginning of the game, where you are fairly weak relative to a lot of the monsters. Harder, in a sense, because I had all these amazing powers and abilities and it was STILL a tough fight.

And I brought a troll ^[3] and a werebear named “Riddick” ^[4]to the fight by my side! I never would have made it if I had been fighting alone.

Which is a problem. I feel like I was relying too much on my followers and pets and that meant that I didn’t get as far in my skills as I would have had I been flying solo. And, in general, I got “soft”.

But what the hell. I was playing a character whose specialty was up-close hand to hand combat, and I just don’t have the reflexes for it any more.

I started a new character this morning, but I don’t think she will work out. I am trying to make her be too many things at once because I had so many competing character ideas when character creation time came around.

But she can’t be a wizard specializing in conjuring AND a sniper (or “sneak archer” as they call it in the fandom) AND a two handed weapon expert AND a battle mage AND a dozen other things I could think of.

Plus, this is my first serious time trying to play as a child character, and it’s just not working out. It feels so wrong to be taking my little elf gal into horrible mortal danger as an adventurer. Before I tried it, I thought it would be kind of cute. A tiny little elf child summoning big powerful monsters, then just sitting back and letting said monsters take on the bad guys for her.

But no. It just feels wrong. And there’s surprising practical difficulties as well. Like not being tall enough to reach parts of important puzzles.

So I will start over again, lesson learned. 

That means I have to choose between two main character concepts, a lady wood elf who is a “sneak archer” and in harmony with nature, or a ice-cold high elf sorceress who specializing in conjuring magic.

Right now, I am leaning towards the former. I’ve never played a ranged weapon based character before, nor have I played a stealthy character,. and I am intrigued by the challenge of having to pay the game a totally different way.

The real challenge, though, will be keeping myself from getting frustrated and saying “Fuck it!” and starting over with a character idea that is more straightforward.

My guess is that my lady elf will end up being more warrior than sniper. I’ve been through this before. I think sniping is very cool and I always want to be a sniper in video games, but I just don’t have the temperament for it.

I see the enemy and I want to fight it, right there, directly. I don’t have the patience to slowly sneak into place, line up my shot, wait for the right moment, then take them out with a single well aimed shot.

That’s way too indirect for me. I like having it as an option, but I am, as you know, a Taurus, and we have a built in intolerance for indirect engagement.

We’re very direct people. We can’t stand things that are slow, indirect, overcomplicated, and deny us access to one of our primary strengths, which is our ability to tackle a problem head on and use our ability to focus our energies into an action to solve the problem via overwhelming force.

Bulls aren’t exactly known for being sneaky.

Still, as long as I keep tackling those situation as an archer, I will forced to play the game in a somewhat different way.

But part of me will be aching to just whip out a sword and start hacking away.

I suppose my chilly conjurer lady concept could be seen as indirect. But it’s the kind a Taurus likes, the kind where others take care of the instant action type things while we get time to think and plot our next move.

Come to think of it, that’s what I had with MEF. Hmmm. I might have to recruit allies again so I can hang back and snipe like a mofo.

Well, I’ve rattled on about things nobody but me cares about for long enough. Thank you for indulging me, gentle reader.

It feels good to talk about the other half of my “life” for a change.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was idly flipping through my old videos on YouTube today when I came across this blast from the past :

Stop smacking your lips. dammit!

Just look at me. So young, so full of life, so confident. Ah, if only I could go back to those simpler and more innocent days of

*checks date on video*

…September 15, 2014.

What can I say, uit’s been a long three years.

And honestly, everything pre-Trump looks like Eden to me now.

Anyhoo, that video, plus discussing it in therapy today, got me to thinking about those early adulthood days when I was in real danger of becoming an obnoxious snide intellectual bully, and the people who put me on the right path.

They are, in chronological order…

I. The Two Professors

This was my first major wake-up call, and for reasons which will becomke clear, it was very, very effective.

The year : 1992.
The place : the University of Prince Edward Island
The season : Late spring

So I am walking from one class to the next when I am approached by one my philosophy professors, who takes me aside and quietly and earnestly explains to me how I have been dominating class discussions and intellectually muscling people out of the conversation, and how other people with perfectly valid opinions were not being heard because they don’t have as strong a personality/voice as me, and how I needed to learn to rein it in.

This was news to me. I had never thought of it like that before. Growing up as the youngest of 4 kids in a very talkative family, I learned to push hard to be heard at an early age.  I was accustomed to having to overcome a certain amount of resistance just to get a word in edgewise. I was quite accustomed to being the intellectual underdog.

The idea that I could be the one forcing others out of the conversation had never occurred to me. I was a far more thoughtful and concerned person after that talk.

But I was still on the fence about the whole thing.  After all, I was a brash twenty year old male who was still exploring his powers and his limitations and beginning to develop an image of himself as a potent intellectual. The idea of holding back did not appeal to me. I was feeling my oats and wanted to run wild and free and feel the power of my mighty mind muscles and the wind flowing through my mane.

Oh, have I mentioned that I was a horse back then? Must have slipped my mind.

So there I am, walking between classes for the second time that day, head full of emotions I was trying to sort out, when I get approached by a different philosophy professor of mine, who takes me aside and gives me the exact same talk.

Not word for word, obviously, but identical in substance.

And the thing is, neither of them had any idea that the other one was doing it too. Believe me, I asked. By some cosmic stroke of fate, without any coordination at all, two different profs talked to me about the exact same thing on the exact same day.

That kind of drove the point home. If two profs for whom I had a lot of respect felt the need to tell me about the same problem on the same day, I figured there must be something to it. Clearly, I had to make some changes.

I didn’t want to make those changes. But I am not the sort of person who can ignore his effect on others just to feed his own ego. I always have and always will want to avoid hurting people without very good cause. I could not pretend I didn’t know. And I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t responsible.

Part of me really, really wanted to take that path, though. The path of saying “If they can’t hold their own in an argument, that’s their problem, not mine,. I’m not going to hold back just to save their precious feelings. They should either toughen up or stay out of the discussion. Screw them!”

Or, even more obnoxiously (and I have taken this tack in my life, much to my shame), “Hey, I am just a person with an opinion like anyone else. I’m just doing what everyone else is doing. Why single me out?”.

Because you’re a fucking giant, that’s why. You can’t pretend to be equal to others when you know damned well that you have a massive natural advantage over them. I had been unconsciously using that natural advantage – the fact that I thought faster and deeper and bigger that everyone else – to push people around and bully them into letting me pontificate and stroke my own ego.

That wass completely unacceptable.

So I changed. Somewhat. I learned to respect other people’s opinions, to leave space in the conversation for the shyer, quieter type people, and to pay attention to my body language and vocal tone to make sure I was not unconsciously intimidating people.

Looking back at what a horrible asshole I could have turned out to be, I am filled with gushing gratitude to those two men who took time to take me on (never an easy thing) and make me understand what I was doing.

Without them, who knows. I might have turned into some kind of Ayd Rand moral infant so in love with how smart and clever he is that he constructs an entire philosophy around the message of “I won’t share and you can’t make me!”.

It’s a horrifying thought – I have deep and abiding contempt for that sort of person and feel like it is my mission to destroy them – but I can’t deny the possibility.

I’m just glad I didn’t take that route.

And I am glad that I have always rejected elitism in all forms. Since early childhood, I have known that I have a simply massive mind and a very high IQ.

And still, I rejected the whole notion that this meant I was better than anyone else.

I could never be that blind to the world.

I could never be “that guy”.

I am simply not that kind of person.

And I’m glad.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel all thick in the head today.

It makes it hard to think, let alone write. I was around 200 words in to a piece about the anti-freedom reactions people are having to the incident in Charlottesville when I realized that I was totally lost and could not get the words out, so I started over.

Dunno why I feel this way. I know it’s not lack of sleep. I’ve had lots. Too much, maybe.

It’s probably a sinus thing. I just took a Reactine Sinus and Allergy. Let’s hope that does the trick. Because I am really hating this mental fog.

It’s so much worse than my usual mental fog.

What’s worse is that I am feeling very depressed right now. At least physically. I am feeling a very strong urge to crawl back into bed and hide from reality right now. I feel tense and anxious and very vulnerable. I feel tiny and scared and completely overwhelmed by damn near everything.

I mean, here it is, in the middle of the afternoon in middle of August, and I am shivering. I actually feel cold. That’s how ratched up and raw my nerves are right now.

Hopefully things will improve once I get the sinus thing resolved. I can endure this mental state for a while if I think relief is in sight.

Let’s check a few more things. I know it’s not low blood sugar because I ate a substantial meal two hours ago.

Although…. low blood sugar does often leave me feeling cold and shaky. Hmmm. Maybe I should drink a small amount of apple juice and see if it helps.

And I know it’s not a question of medication, because I took my full suite of morning meds with my meal. So I have plenty of Paxil and Wellbutrin in my bloodstream.

In theory, that means that my chemicals should be in balance. But that is clearly not the case, given how I feel.

Reminder : I feel like shit.

In fact, right at this second, I feel so delicate and vulnerable that all it would take is a light touch and I would crumble into dust like an ancient book.

I think the sinus meds are helping, though. I feel calmer than before.

Maybe the nap I took after eating lunch was a bad idea. For some reason, sleeping at that particular time often leads to me waking up feeling a lot worse than when I went to sleep. Perhaps it’s the afternoon heat.

But the alternative is to try to force myself to stay awake despite feeling very, very sleepy And that can be very stressful, and also not good for my mood.

So it’s catch-22 yet again. No good options. No way out.

But whatever. This too shall pass. Writing about it helps. Pathological anxiety comes from unresolved energies trying to find a way to express themselves.

Simply giving those energies a way out does wonders for the mood. All it takes is a little patience and focus to get the process started.

And the self-knowledge to know that the depression and/or anxiety will make releasing the energy seem terrifying. It will try to convince you that if you open up even a tiny bit, the whole system will explode like an overfilled balloon.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Slow release is possible. You can let the air out of the balloon in a controlled and healthy way.

You just have to be patient and willing to do the emotional work it takes to get to the point where you find your emotional release valve and ease it open.

Everyone needs an outlet.

The good thing about being an experienced depressed and/or anxious person is that I know not to panic just because I am panicking. I am sufficiently detached from the random fluctuations of my goddamned chemicals to be able to sit outside them and say “Oh, it’s this again. I will do what I can to fix it, but if that fails, I’ll just wait it out. ”

It doesn’t make these periods of instability any more fun, but it makes them a lot more endurable. I know that, emotionally speaking, the rains will end and the sun will come out again and all I have to do is keep it together till that happens.

Beforte this evolution in my metaconscious mind, the state of my chemicals was the state of the universe, subjectively speaking. And living in so unstable a universe is a scary scary thing.

Imagine how bad it is for schizophrenics. Their reality is even more subject to their chemical instability than mine.

When I say I feel like a light touch would make me fall to pieces, I know that I am speaking metaphorically. A schizophrenic might believe it to be literally true.

It’s a terrifying thought.

Sometimes I wish I could just get comfortable in my bed, let my mind defocus, and open all my emotional floodgates so that everything can finally resolve itself and the slow dance of recovery would be resolved in one huge apocalyptic cataclysm.

Sure, it would be absolutely horrible while it was happening, but should I survive, I would feel so much cleaner and lighter afterwards.

Instead, I am stuck trying to learn to be content with the steady slow drip of release I get from the process of recovery, and the larger (but still a tiny proportion of the mass) releases I get from writing in this blog and, occasionally, therapy.

At least I have learned to treasure and encourage my restlessness. I used to quash it ands quash it HARD, treating it like it was some alien agent causing me nothing but pain when all I wanted was to be left alone.

Now I know that my restlessness comes from my life force trying to express itself. It’s the part of me capable of overcoming my lack of motivation. In fact, it’s where motivation lives. I want ot learn to let the spirit move me, so to speak.

But first… I have to let go of my current life and world.

And that scares mne.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had this song on my mind lately.

That’s totally not the video I downloaded the song from, but I can’t find that one, so here ya go.

Love the guy’s douchey expression.

Anyhow, I love that song because it does such a great job of expressing how a lot of lonely straight dudes feel. To me, it is crystal clear that the attitudes being expressed in the verses are not being endorsed. They are, in fact, being shown in all their horror and brutality. I get the feeling that everything in there is something that the songwriter(s) has experienced and was so horrified by it they could not process it.

If so, then this song would act as their way of dealing with these unacceptable, indigestible memories. That’s how art works sometimes : a way for the artist to regurgitate their bad memories and send them back into the world, and thus, be rid of them at last.

It’s quite the neat trick, when you think about it.

Anyhow, this “nice guys finish last” sentiment comes from a very real place in the straight male psyche. Society teaches us that woman want men to behave a certain way, and that if they behave that way, women will like them.

Then they see someone who breaks all those rules and treats women like shit and the women lap it up and beg for more, and they feel betrayed.

Part of the problem is that the “nice guy” mentality makes it hard to recognize the other parts of the equation of attraction. Niceness alone will never be enough to win the heart of the fair maiden… or the fair lass.

There’s so many other factors. Physical attraction. Respect. Compatibility. Similar interests. Chemistry. Your respective moods. And so forth and so on.

Of all those factors, respect is probably the largest contributor, and it’s the one where the “angry nice guy” is most likely to fail. Sure, the ladies (or laddies) want someone with whom they get along, but they also want someone they can respect.

And being servile and eager to please and willing to change to be whatever the other person wants to you makes you nearly impossible to respect.

In fact, it engenders contempt, and if you try to put yourself in the other person’s position, you will understand why.

People want to deal with people who are their own person. Someone real, with a personality and limits and their own likes and dislikes. They are not looking for the most “user friendly” person around.

Also, the “angry nice guy” tends to be the sort of guy who internalizes a set of rules as to how to get the girl and then gets very frustrated when they follow all those rules and still don’t get the girl.

Life doesn’t work like that, fellas. Thi sisn’t school.  You don’t get the girl by having the highest marks in the dating class.

In fact, the whole “get the girl” mentality is fundamentally flawed, because it suggests that there is a way to “earn” the girl, and the truth is that there just plain isn’t.

People either click or they don’t. Individual merit often plays very little part in it. The right person for you will come along and you will click with them. All the others were just bit players in your love story.

Like I have said many times before, the only dating advice worth a damn is “meet lots of people”. That increases your odds of meeting the right person for you. Everything else is secondary, and futile if you are not meeting new people.

I’m not saying meeting new people is easy – I sure as hell can’t manage it. But it is good advice nevertheless, despite that.

This advice might seem harsh and it is definitely unromantic to look at love as a lottery where the idea is to buy as many tickets as you can and hope to get lucky. A lot of people will reject the entire notion due to how unpalatable it is.

But when you think about it, it’s also very freeing, because it means that merit is no longer the primary factor and that therefore rejection is not a reflection of your lack of merit. It has nothing to do with whether you are “good enough” for the person.

All it means is that this was not the right person. That was not a winning ticket. You failed at nothing.

That doesn’t mean you should give up if it doesn’t work out right away; Persistence is also a good thing to have when you really feel strongly attracted to someone in a way that is beyond desperately wanting to bone them.

A lot of the time, there’s a lot of psychological garbage that you have to wade through in order to really connect with someone. You could find the objectively perfect person for you and you still have to jump through hoops because of trust issues, the ghosts of previous relationships, weird parental issues, or whatever.

That’s why I get annoyed when people say they are not interested in “playing games” in relationships any more. Yeah right. Those “games” exist for a reason. They are the many ways in which people navigate the dangerous terrain between being attracted and being intimate. The rules are always the same – drawing closer to the other person while not risking getting hurt – and so the whole complex dance of love is not exactly something you can just get rid of.

You can, however, remove a lot of unnecessary steps.

Anyhow. I guess the main point I wanted to make toiday was that nice guys only finish last when they persist in believing that niceness alone should be enough to get them the girl of their dreams.

It’s a great asset, but it’s not enough on its own. Like a certain cracked.com columnist said. if all you have is niceness to give to the world, you’re like a product whose main selling point is that it’s nontoxic.

Yeah, but what does it actually DO?

Ask yourself the same thing, and you will be enlightened.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let me tell you something about my with and in Skyrim.

I have LOT of mods. And they all do something fun. So, like I have said before, I tend to keep adding mods until the damn thing breaks, then hit restart (which in this case means the “disable all mods” button in Nexus Mod Manager) and start over from scratch, as it were.

And for a while, I was doing this literally once a day. Which is totally crazytown. And it got me thinking about my relationship to the restart button, both in video games and what I am pleased to my real life.

At least one half of “real life” is probably true. But sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Anyhoo, the urge to restart has pecked away at me for a long time. It’s even making me want to start a new character, even though my current one, an Argonian (aka lizard man) warrior who specializes in fighting with a sword in each hand, has tons of experience and I’ve done huge swathes of the game with him and invested many many hours in developing him.

So why would I want to start over, and throw that all away?

It’s this kind of thing that brings out an inherent problem in my astrological chart. I won’t bore you with too many details, but basically my Sun sign, the primary sign of my personality, is Taurus.

And we Taurus bulls like things like reliability, permanence, investing hard work in things that are worthwhile, and things that last.

So far so good. The problem arises when you look at the rest of my chart, which is nearly all mutable signs and mutable signs hate things like permanence, hard work, and things that last.

Mutable signs need the freedom to switch from one thing to the next when they get bored or restless. They have to be able to change the channel in life or they will start to feel trapped and anxious.

That is, more or less, the exact opposite of being a Taurus.

So I have this conflict where part of me is sensible, practical, and reliable, and part of me is a freedom and autonomy loving restless soul who never wants to be tied down by things like responsibility and commitment/.

It makes it hard to know who I really am.

The Taurus in me finds the idea of starting over before I have completed the game with my current character absolutely insane. Total madness. I have accumulated so much value in this character. Why would I throw that all away to start over? That would be like stopping your car 100 meters from the finish line at the Indy 500.

The thing to do is see things through to the end. Only then do you ponder starting over.

And that is perfectly logical and sensible. But I can’t totally agree with it either.

Because the rest of me really wants to start over with a fresh slate, free of prior history and ready to explore anew. It would let me try a different kind of character (probably sneaky archer) and a different race (one of the sneakier types of elf), and it would renew my interest in the game, which has been flagging lately.

And it’s been flagging precisely because I have accumulated so many quests and so much loot and a whole gang of followers and I long to be free and fresh and unattached and uncommitted again.

It’s the desire for renewal, basically, and I should not dismiss it out of hand. I have a real problem with renewal in the spiritual sense. It’s a chronic issue with us Taurus types. We tend to hold on to things and keep trudging ever forward with giving ourselves the chance to refresh and renew ourselves.

In fact, we often violently resist our own renewal because we can only view it as sudden change, and we hate sudden change.

Even if it’s a super positive change.

It’s kind of tragic, really.

But now I am wondering what would be so bad about starting over. I mean, this is a game I play for fun, so whatever makes it more fun should be fine, right?

It’s not like I have promised someone I would finish the game with this character. I don’t owe it to the game to stick with one  character till the end. Starting over certainly isn’t a crime even if it isn’t “necessary” and it wouldn’t mean I was some horrible kind of person who can’t see anything through.

All it would me is that I got bored of being a hand to hand fighter and decided that I wanted to try being a sneaky sniper type.

And what’s wrong with that?

And my current character would not cease to exist. He’d still be there, in the save game,s ready to resume his adventure any time I wanted.

And yet, when I think about starting over, I get this stab of guilt. A stab that feels suspiciously like being gored by a bull.

So I dunno. It’s crazy in here, that’s all I can say.

I probably will end up starting a new character. One as different from my current one as I can get, more or less. And who knows, after playing her for a while, I might get bored and frustrated and go right back to my current guy and his awesome stats and gear.

I know there’s one thing I have to try first : taming a dragon. There’s this one quest where you can acquire your very own dragon by using your “tame beast” spell, and I have tried to complete it many times but the dragon always completely kicks my ass.

And the thing is, acquiring this dragon works by Pokemon rules, namely that you have to beat the shit out of the critter before you can capture it.

So I have been diligently working towards being able to lay a pounding on the thing until I can force it to love me. I have been building up my own power and strength, and equipping my followers with the best of the gear I have acquired, and hopefully I will soon be ready to take on the dragon and win.

SO I have to do that, anyhow.

But after that, who knows? No if only there was a reset button for life…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, an update :

I still haven’t written that thing I went  on and about in yesterday’s post. I chickened out.  I started thinking about all the heavy social fallout I might have unleashed with it, and how it would hurt everyone I know and care for, and I chickened out.

I still plan on writing it. I have to, the words need to get out. And I still might post it where I planned on posting it. But not before reading everything I can get my hands on about how to do things with total anonymity in this day and age.

I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I wish I could post it under my own name and let the chips fall where they may. And if the only one who could be hurt by it was me, I would go right ahead and do it.

I relish the thought of being a lightning rod for my people. The one who dares to come out of the closet and into people’s faces with the message that we are people too, and the things you believe to be true about us are rank prejudice.

Being the public face of my people would suit me. I have the right skills. I’m highly articulate, very intelligent, a dragon level master at arguing, and I have the right combination of stubbornness and charisma to put my points across in the face of massive opposition from a society that has been fed the message that we are the absolute worst kind of people for decades and does not want to even think about what I will be talking about and thus would have a huge allergic reaction to my message.

To be honest… I think I would really enjoy that role. I suppose that'[s the trickster in me. Like I have said, the trickster’s highest role is to make people think about things they don’t want to think about and thus advance the conversation and bring about change.

Or something like that. I am still working on that definition.

Plus I have a very combative side to my personality that has lain dormant for over twenty years because I realized that other people aren’t there to be my intellectual sparring partners and I should really stop picking verbal fights just to feel the thrill of mind to mind combat.

I will still argue my position sometimes, but when I do so, I am acutely aware of how those with whom I argue are feeling and I am always ready to back off and disconnect if I think people are going to get hurt.

There is a lot of power in this bruised and broken brain of mine, and it’s up to me to make sure that power is used responsibly.

However, were I the public face of an extremely unpopular group of people, I would have lots and lots of opportunities to use my powers for good, so to speak. The whole world would be my sparring partner then, and I would have a nearly infinite challenge ahead of me that would let me truly explore my powers.

And what can I say….. I love to fight. Maybe that means I am crazy. I don’t know.

But I can tell you this : the times when I am passionately arguing my position in the face of massive opposition are the times in my life when I have felt the most truly alive.

It’s like I am an intellectual Klingon.

So if it was just me that could get hurt – and I mean hurt as in assassinated, my views would be that unpopular – I would go’er and never look back.

But it’s not just me that could suffer and that is something I really have to think about.

It makes me wonder how the families of other passionate articulators felt about them. surely they must have, in private at least, wished their loved one had never opened their big fat mouths and that their lives could go back to normal.

Surely some of them even got ostracized big most or all of their family for their views both as a moral reaction to them and as a pragmatic measure for keeping themselves from getting sucked into the social black hole said articulators would be generating.

Public statements of disavowal, disapproval, and distance most likely were made. And I wouldn’t blame people for doing it. They never asked to go on this crazy trip with you.

It makes sense that they would feel the need make that really, really clear.

And yet, these heroes of mine, like Martin Luther and Nelson Mandela, still went through with it. They had the courage to speak up for their group and call the lightning down on their heads because they knew that things had to change.

I don’t have that courage yet. I hope to have it some day, preferably sooner rather than later as I ain’t getting any younger and it will be a very long road to acceptance for my people and their needs.

A road I might not survive. Kinda gotta keep that in mind. I would sure as hell get a fuckton of death threats and threats of grievous personal harm.

You might think I am making too big of a deal of this, but I know what I am talking about. There are lines you just don’t cross because society holds certain things to be sacred and beyond argument, and I would be challenging one of the deepest of said things.

Often these topics are referred to as “third rail” topics because, like the third rail of a subway or light rail service, to touch it would be fatal and once you touched it, you would be locked into it till you die. ^[1]

Well my message would walk right up to one of the biggest of third rails and French kiss it with gusto.

And that’s something I am going to have to think about before I pull the trigger.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tomorrow is Back to Work day!

I apologize for the vagueness which will permeate what I am about to say, but the sad truth is that it”s completely necessary.

There is a document I need to write. I need to write it because I am the only one who can do it and it definitely needs to be done. In that sense, I don’t feel like I have a choice in the matter.

Man’s gotta do, etc.

But I am scared. This document could get me in a lot of trouble. And not just me. Everyone who knows me. My family. My friends. My therapist. Everyone.

Because to say the views I will express in this document will be extremely unpopular is an understatement along the lines of referring to a nuclear submarine as a “little boat” or referring to the Grand Canyon as “that little hole over there”.

Words cannot do it justice, really.

These views fly in the face of all popular opinion and force people to think about something they really don’t want to think about., and hopefully shock them out of their comfortable hate and force them to consider the group these view represent in a new light, as human beings.

A group to which I belong. It’s one of the most hated groups that exist today despite the fact that nobody chooses to be in it and nobody in it can choose to leave, either.

Some things, once set, stay set. Forever.

My group is such an easy target that politicians of all stripes have no problem advocating for harsher treatment of the members of said group despite the fact that said group is mostly harmless and isn’t hurting anyone.

But the group, being weak and powerless and so shunned by society that nobody dares speak up for them when they are forced into ghettos, or subject to blatantly unethical “medical” treatments, or even when the good, normal, decent folk of the world have no problem playing a fun game where they take turns describing all the truly horrific and inhumane things they would do to one of us if they “caught” us.

All because we violate a very deep taboo, one that possibly part of our very DNA. It’s such a powerful taboo that much well-intended harm is done by people reacting blindly to it and lashing out without thought to the consequences.

You know I’m not talking about being gay, right? That battle’s over.

My group is so hated that people go to great lengths to avoid any possible action that even suggest they might belong to the group. The sheer paranoia about this taboo is astounding. At all times, people feel they must make it absolutely and abundantly clear that they are normal and safe and not part of my group at all.

Activities that were once considered completely normal and safe are now considered taboo. The white hot glare of narrow minded suspicion passes over every person who matches even the vaguest of criteria for membership in my group.

The ferocity of this taboo is only matched by how unexamined it is and the degree to which none of its basic assumptions make a lick of sense and are merely word noise put in place to meet the very minimal requirements necessary to make this taboo seem like it has something to do with reason and compassion.

It has nothing to do with either, but that’s ever stopped people before.

Absolutely nobody outside this group of mine will ever stick up for us. That’s rock solid certain. Nobody wants to be even remotely associated with us and heaven forbid that anyone express any human concern for us because everyone agrees that we are the lowest of the low and even so much as expressing the opinion that we are human beings and that means we probably have at least a few rights would instantly mark someone as a “sympathizer” and they would be ostracized almost as brutally as if they had confessed to being part of this group themselves.

And all to defend people everyone already agrees is less than worthless? People who could not possibly have a lower social status than they do now?

What kind of person would risk everything for THAT kind of person?

And so the only way any progress will be made is if we stick up for ourselves. That’s pretty hard to do when none of us – even those of us born to wealth and power and privilege – dare admit to membership in the group at all.

Including me. I am going to write this document and I am going to post it to a community I know to be a haven for people like me. Hopefully, others of my group will read what I have written and take comfort and hope from my words.

These words will be written for them first, the world second. If the world gets wind of the document, and the right (wrong) people catch the salacious scent of a truly epic social massacre in the offering, then the fertilizer with truly strike the air conditioning and all Hades will break loose, especially if the document can be traced back to me.

And the press seems to be awfully good at that type of thing lately. Perhaps because they can call upon the internet hivemind to do distributed research that is funneled into a central clearinghouse for integration and synthesis.

And yet, I feel like it’s something I have to do. I am the one with the skills, the courage, and the will to articulate the pain and injustice of my group, my people. For me, not doing it is no longer an option.

The words are in me and they have to come out or I will go crazy. That’s the selfish part of the equation. Part of my job in this life is to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. And wow, is that true for my group.

So I will take all due caution to post my document as anonymously as I and the Internet know how to do it.

But ti has to be done.

It is my destiny.

And just so you know, those who love and cherish me, that if the shit really goes down and I become the most hated person in the world, I will understand if you no longer feel that you can afford to be associated with me.

It will hurt, but I will understand.

And what the hell. What I do tends to get ignored anyhow.

Might as well get it off my chest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.