Currently stuck in my head :

It’s a great album. Tells the story of a poor little rich boy. Here’s the song I really identify with, or at least, with the chorus :

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I know how you feel, man. When I was a kid, I envied (without being able to articulate it) the poor kids with stable, loving families. I would have traded all my middle class stuff for parents and siblings who wanted me around.

The sort of family my babysitter Betty had. They were poor, and everything in their house was cheap, and growing up she’d had to share a bedroom with two other siblings, and so forth and so on.

But when I was there, I could feel the love and the bond between them, and often wished I could stay.

In those days, her family paid a lot more attention to me than my own. And they seemed to care if I was happy, too. With them, I felt like I was being cared for.

As opposed to at home, where I felt like I was barely being tolerated, and to get that I had to be completely accommodating, never ask for anything, and “understand” when my needs got utterly neglected or something I cared about was withdrawn in favour of the comfort and convenience of others.

No matter what, they knew I would “understand”.

It was a very cold childhood. Perhaps that’s because I come from a family of chilly intellectuals, I don’t know. I’ve talked here before about how cerebral a family we turned out to be.

And we also all turned out to have mental health issues. Way to go, Mother and Father. You successfully raised a crop of brilliant kids with fucked up heads.

And of the four of us, I got the biggest dose of both of those things.

My siblings have their issues, true. But they also had friends when we were growing up. I did not. And it’s not like I was going to get the necessary emotional and social stimulation from my icebox of a family.

As a result, I was a depressed kids in an area when nobody knew that was even a thing that could happen. I withdrew hard into my little world of TV and books and video games. A world I still live in to this very day.

Obviously, I am pretty bitter about all that.

But what can I do? It’s in the past. It’s far too late to get mad about how I was treated forty years ago.

Nevertheless, I am pretty pissed off about it. My childhood burned its lessons about my place in the world into my so deeply that I was in my early thirties before I even realized how badly I had been raised.

It’s a staggeringly sobering thing to realize that despite your brilliant mind, you have been completely blind to profoundly important truths about your life for as long as you can remember, all the way back to your early childhood.

Every childhood is normal, I guess, until you compare it to others and realize what exactly you should have had.

As you patient readers know, I am still working through all this emotional garbage from my childhood. It’s taking such a long time, I suspect, because of that heavy dose of icy intellectualism I got from my family.

That left me without the emotional tools to deal with my problems directly. I have to work through them intellectually, which takes a hell of a lot longer.

I mean, I didn’t even have a relationship with a deity who loved and cared about me. No religion in my childhood.

No religion, no friends, no family to rely on, nothing.

Just long days of loneliness, boredom, and fear. Like all emotionally neglected kids, I learned to entertain myself.

And never really learned to do anything else.

Perhaps my highly developed verbal skills come from my (highly intellectualized) attempts to express what I did not know how to express as a child.

Or rather, I suppose, what I was too scared to express. It was very hard for me to articulate my needs because I got such a strong “you don’t matter” vibe from my family that I felt like I had no right to ask for anything, ever.

All that was left was for me to be grateful for whatever fell from the sky into my life. You know, those rare moments when someone noticed me enough to be nice to me.

There was nothing I could do to bring them on, and I had better be grateful for what I did get because I sure as heck didn’t deserve it.

Sometimes I sit and wonder : did I even stand a chance?

Because it’s easy to come up with a million “if only” scenarios. If only I had stood up for myself. If only I had demanded proper treatment from the world instead of passive absorbing whatever happened to me. If only I had used my winning combination of articulacy, passion, and stubbornness to raise a fuss and get myself what I need.

Etcetera, ad nauseum, infinits.

But the fact that there are things now that I wish I had done back then does not mean that I actually could have done them back then. They would have been alien to my nature at the time. I was a product of my environment and felt very little sense of agency or self-determination.

I just adapted to whatever happened without a single thought in my head of having an alternative way of dealing with it.

Just like I had no idea that changing myself in order to fit in was an option. So I never learned to do that, either. I just got lucky and found a group of nerdy friends who would never ask that of me.

We nerds are cool like that.

Come to think of it, my family never demanded that of me either.

That would have involved noticing me and, worse, actually thinking about me and my needs and well-being.

And they sure as hell weren’t going to do that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And yet, my body keeps wishing it was and trying to convince me it is.

See, normally, I have cola with supper on days when I have nothing going on in the evening but work and/or blogging. I have my caffeine fix with my evening meal and then I go use that energy to make the words happen.

But I am out of cola. What I have is root beer. ^[1] And there are a lot of similarities between the two. They are almost the same color, they have roughly the same density, and they have parts of their flavour profile in common.

So my poor caffeine craving body practically whimpers every time I take a drink of what turns out not to be cola.

I’m starting to wonder if I am developing a serious cola habit.

The Keys to the Kingdom

Hey look, section headings.

Finally got my new keyboard today. Typing on it to write these very words.

And of course, it feels weird and wrong and my fingers are not happy with it. That’s to be expected. I spent a long time typing on a very old and worn-in keyboard where the keys had been typed on so much that some of the letters had worn off.

I had to find my N and my M by dead reckoning.

Going from that thoroughly broken in (and broken down) old thing to a new keyboard with new springs and clear and bright letters is bound to be a shock.

Plus, I feel like this keyboard is smaller than my previous one, which is odd because you would think that sort of thing would be standard.

But I suppose  you can always shove the keys a tiny bit closer to each other, I guess.

What I really need is an oversized keyboard for my oversized hands.  Regular keyboards are slightly too small for me. I think a keyboard around 18 percent bigger than the norm, with proportionately larger keys, would be ideal for me.

But I looked at oversized keyboards before I bought this bare-basics model, and holy geez are they expensive. Basically, imagine what you would pay for a normal keyboard, double it, then add a hundred bucks.

American, not Canadian.

So I will make do, as I always do.

Luckily, my incredibly strong need to communicate will easily pull me through the breaking in period for this keyboard

What I Must Write

In therapy today, a story idea came up and I think now is the time that I should finally write it. It has a point that needs to be made and I feel like I am the one to make it.

But god damn is it going to be hell to write it.

It will be hell because I have to get in the lion’s cage of some of the worst things that ever happened to me and get those ferocious pussies to put on a play I wrote.

Oh yeah. I decided it would work best as a short play instead of a short story. It’s all dialogue anyway. And it’s perfect for licensing to small, local theater company who wants to put on something with a lot of impact but a small budget.

Simple setup. Front desk at a police station.Easily depicted with a table on a riser.  One cop, one kid, and a few other characters. A little background noise and you are ready to go with minimal fuss.

It’s about bullying. That’s all I will say about it. I have to keep the energy contained until I actually write the fucking thing.

It will not be fun to write. But I will feel much better once I am done.

I swear, sometimes writing can be like passing a stone.

Still Rimming the Sky

And boy, does it taste good. Talk about tasting the rainbow! *laugh track*

I told my therapist about my decision to stop beating myself up over what I am doing in my life and simply accept that I have an enjoyable hobby and good friends and my own creative output and that’s enough for me right now.

Viewed that way, I have a pretty sweet life. Lots of time to have fun and goof around. A game I love to play. Cash in the bank, which helps a whole hell of a lot to improve my mood and make me feel less vulnerable in the world.

Let me tell you of a highly typical bit of mental buffoonery. For nearly a month, I had been wondering why my bank balance hadn’t changed in a while. Was I still getting paid? Whaddy Fug?

It took until a couple of days ago for me to remember that I had sent the money I was getting to Paypal, but I had forgotten to move it from Paypal to my bank. D’oh!

So by the time I got around to it, there was $180 in there. American. That turned into around $225 when converted into Canadian currency.

So I am doing just fine. In fact, I dunno what I am going to do with the money.

Maybe I will get that fancy Serta office chair on which to lower my gigantic buttocks. I spend most of my day sitting here at the computer. Might as well be comfortable.

Maybe I will feed my addiction to Skyrim by buying myself a copy of Skyrim Special Edition, aka SSE. It’s the same game but with souped up graphics and sound and so on. Something for slightly closer to modern computers.

A graphical upgrade for the game could be pretty nice. But I am not going to tocuh it until I know all my favorite mods will work with it.

No mods, no deal.

Heck, maybe I will even buy one of those expensive oversized keyboards.

The possibilities are endless!

Functionally, not literally.

But you probably already figured that out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking the heavy thoughts about the id again.

There’s a fundamental flaw in Western thinking that I think causes a lot of our problems : we make an enemy in our own mind.

We declare war on our primitive selves when we accept the idea that “higher” emotions are good and “lower” emotions are the enemy and the root of all evil. We lock our id away in a deep dark closet and only let it out when it behaves itself and we feel that it is a safe environment to do so.

This mental bifurcation is extremely destructive because we are not our egos OR our ids. We are both. We are monkeys with big brains, animals that can think,  the beast that walks on two legs.

And that means that our ids are as much a part of us as the rest. Trying to punish one part of the mind and lock it away because we identify it with evil is like choosing to be paralyzed on one side of your body because it’s the “evil” side.

The only way we can be happy beasts is if we see ourselves as a complex blend of animal and savant. In fact, the distinction is not really worth making.

Eastern thought, from what I have seen, does not fall prey to that particular absurdity. They avoid that type of moral dualism. This can be very hard for the Western mind to understand because we’ve been raised on such a steady diet of the battle between good and evil that we can’t help but see things in terms of whether the “right” side won or not. Did good triumph over evil? Did the good guys win?

We don’t really understand the sense of balance that a more Eastern point of view embraces. In fact, we’re liable to interpret a story where both sides come together to live in peace and harmony as a partial loss at best, and the good being forced to swallow the poison that is the Bad Guys at the worst.

I had my mind blown open on this subject at an early age by a little known  movie called the Dark Crystal.

(Apologies to those of you who have already heard this story. )

Spoiler alert on a movie from  1982 : I am going to reveal the ending.

In most of said movie, which I saw when I was 9 years old, the moral equation is really simple : our hero, the Gelfling, is the pure and innocent orphan raised by deep, wise, and benevolent creatures called the Mystics, and the Skeksis, a race of vulture-like beings, are evil.

Really, really fucking evil.

Like just…. SO evil.

Words cannot describe how much I hated the Skeksis when I saw that movie in the theater when only 9 years old. They were horrible, filthy beings who had nothing but evil motivations and lived in a society filled with deceit, backstabbing, boot-licking, and every other unpleasant and horrible aspect of human life.

And remember, I had been raised on (mostly) American cartoons that had very clear heroes and villains and there wasn’t a heck of a lot of moral ambiguity.

Throughout the movie, in the background of the main plot, the Mystics are slowly walking to the place where the Skeksis live, and I truly believed that when they got there, the Shit was going to Go Down and the evil Skeksis would be exploded into tiny pieces very painfully.

I am not exaggerating. That is exactly what I wanted to happen at the end. I was visualizing that quite vividly as a way to handle the loathing I felt for the Skeksis, which at times was so intense I almost asked my father if we could leave.

In fact, I think I might have done so once. But he gently declined and told me to hang on, which was quite good parenting and exactly what the father is supposed to do in the nuclear family : encourage their kids to take risks and get stronger.

Anyhow, at the end of the movie, the Mystics finally reach the Skeksis stronghold, and the epic and brutal battle I was counting on… never happened.

Instead, the Mystics merged with the Skeksis, and became a higher form of being of the transcending the flesh type. ^[1]

And I just couldn’t handle that kind of ending at the tender age of nine. My mind was blown to pieces by it. The bad guys had won, right? I mean, why should evil creatures like them get to be higher beings now? That’s not fair! That’s not right!

Thus, I was introduced to the idea of balance being the key, not victory.

It’s obvious to me now that the Mystics were the ego and the Skeksis were the id. And there is no peace without bringing those into balance.

And the thing is, our idiotic Zoroastrian world-view blinds us to the fact that all our “higher” feelings come from the id as well. Love, compassion, nobility, the quest for knowledge, you name it. They all come from our social instincts just like the messy stuff, and that means that you can’t just take some of those instincts and label them good and the rest bad.

It’s all just instincts. Our higher brains simply do what those instincts say.

And I am not saying that we should all act on our emotions all the time. That idea is, in fact, a product of the very false dualism that I am talking about. Like one side has to win and rout the other side.

Self-mastery comes from embracing ourselves in our entirety and negotiating a peace treaty between ego and id that relieves our tension and lets the two sides of the equation work together as easily and fluently as our hands do.

After all, you need both. Right? Right.

I feel like this seeking of balance is my road to travel now. Like most intellectuals, I have let the ego side of things dominate and choke the life out of the id with fear and restrictions and vastly overgeneralized rules.

All the while complaining of feeling unmotivated, tired, and weak.

But now, I know that the id is the source of all motivation and that true self-mastery and spiritual growth comes from harnessing the id’s power, not suppressing it.

Every day, I work to hook more of that motherfucking id power supply to the rest of my psyche, and slowly, one by one, parts of me that were in the dark for decades suddenly power on and start working.

Maybe I am a lot more like my fellow human beings than I thought.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I finally got around to hopping onto Amazon.ca support live chat^[1], and the net effect is that they are shipping me my order again.

So things are cool between me and the Mighty Amazon for now. And they will stay that way… provided the damned thing actually gets delivered this time.

Last time, as you may remember, Purolator tried a maximum of one times to deliver the thing then stuck a sticker on the door of the apartment complex saying I had to go pick the damned thing up at some godforsaken depot out by the airport.

That ended up not happening. I could not pull it off. I looked it up and I could have gotten there by transit. The Canada Line’s airport spur would have gotten me to within about a kilometer of it. And I can walk that far when needed.

But it would have meant having to find my way from the Skytrain to this place, and I have done fairly poorly at that task lately. And it would have meant going to somewhere completely unknown to me, which ups the ante on the social anxiety considerably. And I would have had to carry the thing home myself.

And I was pissed off about the whole thing, which was a factor. I can understand them missing us once. But according to the email from Amazon, they were going to try again next business day, which was the next Monday.

But no. Sticker on door, job over, come and get it, fuck you. Makes me wonder how much Amazon knows about how Purolator is dicking people around.

Well they know more now, because as it turns out, it shows up on Amazon’s side as “lost in transit”, so they think Purolator lost the shipment.

As far as I am concerned, they did.

I tried to arrange a ride to go pick it up, but that was not an option. Felicity was too busy and the depot closes at 7:30 pm, and Joe usually gets home at around 7:15 pm these days, so that wasn’t going to cut it either.

I will meet the forces that be half way by making sure someone is awake and around for the entire business day on Thursday, which is the guaranteed delivery date. That way,  I can be absolutely sure that if it does not arrived, it was not delivered. It wasn’t that they “missed” us. It was that they didn’t even fucking try.

I wouldn’t get my keyboard under that circumstance, I’d get vindication for my dark suspicions about the state of courier delivery these days, and that’s almost as good.

Better, in some ways. Not healthy ways. But ways.

It will be a big load off my mind when that problem is solved. I have had a number of very scary moments lately where I thought this keyboard had died for good and I had a genuine crisis on my hands, but luckily I have been able to coax it back to life so far.

I really hope that somewhere, somehow, Purolator will get in shit for fucking this whole thing up. Customer complaints mean more today than they ever have before because they can be acted upon so swiftly and we live in a world where the reputation of a business is paramount.

You don’t want to get on the internet’s bad guy list, and have people shun your company because you are now seen as a corporate villain and part of all that’s wrong with the world today. That can cost a company millions of bucks in a matter of minutes.

Other than that, things are fairly decent in my life. I have decided to stop beating myself up for my current dissolute lifestyle of pretty much nothing but Skyrim.

So what if it seems like I am wasting my life? It’s mine to waste. And I am spending my days doing something I enjoy, and that means I am pretty happy a lot of the time.

And that is quite the accomplishment in my life.

Most importantly, beating myself up over it accomplishes nothing. Worse than that, it makes me want to escape reality even more and hence pushing me deeper into the arms of my addiction.

While I am Skyrimming (ha!), I am deeply absorbed and quite happy. I am not worried about my life and the time passes easily.

That might not be the life I envision when I graduated from VFS, but spending your days doing something you enjoy is not the worst fate in the world.

Eventually, my Skyrim obsession will fade away (might take a while, but it will) and ambition and discontent will re-emerge naturally and organically.

Over and over again, I must learn the lesson that I am far, far better off working from the inside out – from motivation to acting on said motivation and thus rewarding it with result – rather than from the “outside” in as my fractured and malformed metaconscious tries to enforce its preconceived ideas on my fragile id.

Fuck self-control as we define it in the West, like it’s a thing we impose on ourselves as an act of will as opposed to something which flows naturally from one’s desires for a better future with better outcomes for oneself.

As long as it relies on the mythological substance known as willpower, self-control is doomed to fail. In a sense, that’s the definition of the tragedy of modern life, or at least one of them.

Real self-control flows from within and comes from doing the emotional work necessary to find the part of you that desires the improvement increased self-control will give.

Then it becomes an issue of choosing between two things you want, not a matter of not getting what you want.

And that’s a way easier equation to solve.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And not just in the sense of being a furry.

No, I am talking about something deeper and more emotional than that.I am talking about how, despite my efforts to be a warm and personable person, I can also be quite chilly and alienating and even downright severe I can be. I am talking about how there are times when I can feel myself trying to feel the right thing but the line is dead and so what I get instead is a the silent scream of the void within me that lies where my warmer and more human emotions should be.

I am talking about my broken antenna, and everything that comes with it.

There are parts of my soul that are simply… dead. Inert. Nothing but necrotic scar tissue where healthy flesh should be.

And as it is with the body when its signals aren’t getting through (like when your hand or foot falls asleep), the mind knows that there is a great wrongness to this condition and panics in order to drive to you rectify the situation.

But unlike when the damage is to the body, there is no straightforward approach to fixing a psychological injury.

Doctor : Can you tell me where it hurts? 
Me : ……………………..the space where my feelings should be? 

I think I have known about this deadness inside me for a long time, but never quite on a conscious level because when I came anywhere near recognizing it, my mind would bury it in aggressive distraction and deflection.

It’s easy to see why, because the knowledge of it is absolutely horrifying. It’s one thing to know you are damaged and crazy on an abstract and/or intellectual level, and quite another thing to feel said damage on about as intimate level as is possible.

But now I get it. I know how deeply injured I am on a deep psychological level. All that social isolation really did a number on me, as did my vast unmet need for nurturing. I did not get the right emotional nutrients at a very critical time, and that made me the cripple I am today.

And the first step to fixing the damage is becoming aware of it. After all, you can’t fix problems you deny exist. You have to look your demons in the eye and tell them that you know who they are and now, the fight is on.

I think it’s this damage that leads to some of my feelings of emotional coldness. A cold wind blows from the holes in my soul, and howls across the tundra within like the shrieks of a thousand lonely and frightened ghosts.

For me, poetry happens spontaneously as I try to put things into words.

This inner deadness is also the source of all my talk about wanting to be a real person some day. I don’t really feel like I am part of the human race on anything but the obvious physical and biological sense.

I have the body of a human being. But that’s about it.

And it’s because I can’t feel other people except as dim shadows, as if emotionally speaking I was mostly blind. The signals are out there but my busted antenna keeps most of them from getting through.

As a result, I can come across as quite cold in some situations. The lack of emotional context for my life leaves me with only the cold circuit of logic, calculation, and the pursuit of abstract ideals to motivate me.

For instance, a lot of people would find my at times ruthless pragmatism to be emotionally cold and alienating. Ditto for the moral equivalent of said pragmatism, my deep utilitarianism. What matters is results. Outcomes. That which actually happens.

Everything else is bullshit.

That sort of thing comes from a very deep part of me that seeks to focus in on what truly matters and tune out irrelevancies in order to arrive at solutions. And logically speaking, both positions are hard to argue with.

But that doesn’t mean they represent the entire truth, either. There are limits to language and logic, and sometimes the truth – the real, important, spiritual truth – lies beyond those limits.

I realize how these positions of pragmatism and utility can make me seem inhuman. And that’s not an entirely wrong impression, either. They come from that brutal truth machine part of my mind that relentlessly pursues the truth, and that part of me can be terrifying to behold, even to me.

So sometimes I end up feeling like I am a nice person with a Terminator inside him. And while the Terminator is extremely efficient and effective, it is also brutal and cold.

And yet I can’t simply remove or isolate that side of me. It’s too deeply ingrained on an emotional level, and too damned useful on a personal level. That’s the side of me that sees the truth within the lies and illusions and there is enormous power in that, especially when backed by a considerable intellect finely honed, like mine.

And honestly, I like the feeling of power it gives me. It makes me feel more safe. Like I am not, in fact, entirely abandoned and helpless and vulnerable. I have the Terminator to protect me. I have enormous intellectual power to use like a wizard uses his spells. I have the force of personality that comes from intellectual confidence combined with a certain degree of charisma. I have a mind that is swift and sure and potent.

That means I can fight back.

But none of that matters if the soul within the machine is weak and the connection to the power supply of the id can’t handle the voltage required.

So the temptation is always there to simply surrender all control to that terrifying android and become a ruthless and calculating monster.

At least I would get things done.

But I could never live in a world so cold.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Sorry there was no blog entry yesterday, Sunday, the 6th of August. There was a security issue with my web-hosting account and I did not leave myself enough time to deal with it and then blog. So I did neither. Everything’s hunky dory now, though.)

e title isn’t warning enough, ladies, then listen to this :

This blog entry will delve deeply into my gender issues and society’s. I will be walking on some very touchy ground and there’s a real risk that I will trample on some very delicate sensibilities in the process.

Just know that I am only seeking the truth as I see it, and that any opinion I have that pisses you off is only that… an opinion.

In particular, I will be delving into the minefield that is the relationship between women and gay men. We seem like allies but there’s a lot of anger and resentment going unaddressed and thus unresolved.

So brace yourself… we’re going deep.

Now that the self-aggrandizing and probably unnecessary caveats are over, we can dig into the issue.

It starts, as everything in my life does lately, with Skyrim.

As patient readers know, I have been using Skyrim and its adult oriented modding community to make my little version of Skyrim into a sort of sexual playground wherein I can, through my character, have all kinds of fun.

Seriously. If you’re into it, it’s out there. Even that. Hell, even THAT, and that’s not even legal. But it’s virtual reality,. baby….

You can do whatever (and whomever) you like.

As I have sexplored ^[1], I have found that I am not as homosexual as I thought I was. ^[2]. I am actually a lot closer to bisexual than I would have thought before I had this rather marvelously horny and fun world to use as my sexual canvas.

I find myself quite capable of being attracted to the female virtual people, and often liase with them. It still doesn’t have the power and raw energy of my gay side, but I have been surprised and pleased at how it is coming along.

No pun intended.

In retrospect, it makes sense. ^[3] I have never been repulsed by women, certain odor issues aside. I am not the sort of fag to recoil at the mere mention of women. I do not live in fear of the sight of a vagina. I have always thought tits and pussy were very nice. Vaginas in particular I find have a real charm to them.

Some of them are even downright cute. Your mileage may vary, of course.

To me, those gynopphobic attitudes in some gay men have always seemed highly immature to me. It’s just the “girls are gross” attitude of the homosocial phase of social development carried on far, far pasts its due date.

There’s a big difference between not wanting to fuck them and hating them, boys, and only the first one is justifiable.

Sadly, though, this happy thought of increasing bisexuality ^[4] came with a deadly tag because I found myself thinking “Well, if I am attracted to their bodies and pussies and such in virtual reality but not in true reality, clearly the problem is with women themselves and not their plumbing and such. ”

Not a happy thought for a staunch feminist liberal type fag like me at all. I’ve never though of myself as being part of the deep reservoir of anti-woman hate that lies beneath the surface of the collective consciousness of gay men. ^[4]

But clearly I am not innocent in this issue. I have to ask myself why I have, in a sexual and romantic sense, always completely ignored women.

Why would I, or any other gay man, have that attitude?

And the brutal truth is that it’s because we have a choice.

Straight dudes do not. No matter how much they might hate women, they still have to deal with them for love and sex. They are born needing it. Women have it. And it can seem to some like they are determined to make men suffer as much as possible in order for them to get it.

Gay men, as currently defined, don’t have to put up with that shit at all. We have another entire gender (our own) to get our sex from, and I think that leads a lot of gay guys to just go with what’s easier.

Add in the social stigma homosexuality in men has carried for a long time, and you create the need to form one’s identity around one’s sexual orientation and the (subconscious) decision becomes even easier.

Basically. a gay man lives in a world in which it is only ever up to men, not women, to control when sex happens.

Straight guys would love that. It would make life so much easier for them.

So I have to wonder if I ever was truly homosexual, and indeed, to wonder if homosexuality as we define it today even exists.

Perhaps we fags are not born gay so much as we are born with various factors making male male attraction an option – like, say, a weakening of same-sex aversion responses coupled with various sociological factors that cause us to view women as not an option and so we go for the next most stimulating thing – our fellow men.

That would jibe with my thinking concerning homosexuality being as much of a social construct as heterosexuality and bisexuality being our natural state.

A natural state I am pleased to find myself moving towards. I have long considered bisexuality to be a spiritually superior state of being to any form of monosexuality.

But if there is one thing you take away from reading this, let it be this :

There’s no such thing as gay or straight.

There’s just people who have the option of not having to deal with the opposite gender for sex and love, and those who, for whatever reason, do not.

I truly believe that if society did not force us to choose, most people would be at least somewhat bisexual in orientation.

Because baby… we’re just born that way!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I get so sick and tired of myself sometimes.

I suppose that’s a side effect of developing one’s inner parent as a step in getting over one’s abandonment issues. Now that I have an inner parent of sorts, it gets exasperated by my inner child all the goddamned time.

Right now, the annoyance is at how whiny my inner child is being about having to leave the apartment today in order to go to the drug store and pick up some pills.

The drug store that is one block away. If it was any closer, I’d be living there.

I have to do it because I am out of Paxil. The last time I went there for a refill on pills, they didn’t have enough Paxil on hand to fill the order so they could only give me half of the prescribed amount.

The pharmacist offered so deliver the rest personally when he got it, but I airily declared that he needn’t bother as I would just come and get the rest when I needed it.

“It will give me an excuse to get out of the house. ” I added.

Well now I need it, and so I have to put up with a whiny lazy inner child who dpesn’t want to have to wake up fully and put on pants.

If it was up to him, I would skip the whole thing and stay home and end up having to go an entire weekend sans Paxil because I was too lazy to walk one block and pick it up/

That kind of thing used to happen a lot in my life. I would make “decisions” like that all the time, and think nothing of it. It was self-destructively self-indulgent and when I look back on it now, it boggles the mind.

Especially because through the whole thing, I would retain a kind f blithely innocent pose, as if there was nothing I could do about it and the fact that I even had to think about it was some kind of grave injustice and an indictment of life in general and my so-called life in particular.

God, what a pathetic attitude towards life.

Life takes effort, especially if you want to be happy. The oral-retentive fantasy of a life where everything just comes to you without you having to do a thing is a fool’s paradise, a decadent nightmare that would cause spiritual death were it to occur.

You have to strive. Not because there is some kind of abstract virtue in struggle and strife. Fuck that shit.

You have to strive and try and stretch your capacities because that’s the only way to be happy. You have a certain amount of energy for effort and if it is not spent, the system gets backed up and the energy turns inward and destroys you.

It would be a highly ironic hell for that fantasy to be fulfilled so that everything the dreamer can think of is easily at hand and yet they are dying on the inside and all the richest of the world amount to nothing but a golden noose choking the life out of them.

Something to watch out for in the unlikely event that I become successful. I can easily image falling into that particular hole. Spend all day indulging myself until I am more depressed than I ever was when I was poor because now there is “no reason” for me to be so goddamned miserable.

We suffer so much due to our lack of spiritual education. We should be teaching the kids that when they get tired of material indulgence and the trappings of “success”, there is a way out, and that way out is to take it to the next level and seek not pleasure or contentment or pacification but fulfillment.

Or, looked at from a different angle, meaning. They amount to the same thing.

It’s oddly ironic that I can think and write stuff like that and yet still be the guy who has trouble motivating himself to walk one block to pick up the most important medication he takes. It makes me think of a bit from Alice in Wonderland that’s always stuck with me (for some reason) where the narrator says she always gave herself very good advice but very seldom followed it.

When my mother read that part to me when I was a wee sprog, I instantly identified with it without having a clue as to why.

And it’s still true. I can give myself (and others)  top notch advice filled with wisdom, consideration,. empathy. and the passionate desire to help,. and yet, in my case…

Nothing happens. Nothing changes.

Clearly, I need more than good advice. I need impetus to follow it. To make the changes needed and see them through. Changes I know damned well are the smart thing to do, and yet I do nothing because the advice (both the dispensing and the receiving of) has helped enough that the problem no longer seems that important.

It’s a profoundly ignorant position, and I hate to think of myself as the sort of person who is unable to improve his lot in life because he is too week and lazy to do the things he knows will make his life better.

I generally don’t approve of such people.

But I get it. Change is very scary, especially when the bad chemicals in your head make you feel like you are just barely keeping your head above water as it is and any change could bring the whole trembling and fragile house of cards a-tumbling down.

And then you’d really be crazy.

But there is no such thing as change without change. If you want a better life, that in and of itself is a desire for change and that means you have to be open to change, or declare yourself perfectly happy in your current life.

And be honest with yourself : if you declare that, you are also very clearly saying that the benefits of the necessary change do not justify the effort and will it would take to make that change.

In other words, it’s just not worth it to you.

That will put things in perspective for you. And in case that’s not enough, imagine a person winning the lottery but deciding that the effort it would take to turn in the winning ticket and collect their millions make it “just not worth it”.

You don’t want to be like that person, do you?

Of course not.

So change your life already!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I turn up my nose at absolutely everything I am qualified for.

And this amuses the heck out of me. It’s hilarious that I have become so proud and full of myself in such a short time.

Doing five scripts a week will do that to a fella, I suppose. Especially when he has carte blanche to write it however he likes. Even though I’m working for a business so small you need a microscope to see it and the pay is even smaller, simply by writing those scripts and developing my voice and style in the process has done wonders for my self-esteem and  confidence and I feel more ready to do whatever than ever before.

The problem is, regular work has made me lazy and unambitious. So any job opportunity would have to be pretty damn amazing just to overcome my inertia. I have my gig, such as it is.

And I keep lazily moving the goalposts. At one point, I was planning to look for extra work after 30 scripts. Then 45 came and went. Now it’s 60.

I will reach 60 by the end of August. What then?

Forget trying to break into the industry. I sure did. All of that went out the window when I landed my current gig.

It was just too perfect for me. Something I could do for a couple of hours a day, with weekends off.  And nothing to force me out of my comfort zone.

Sometimes. things being too comfortable can be deadly. In the long term.

So during this vacation of mine, I am going to do my best to shake off the lethargy and at least poke around a little. Who knows, I might find something better than my current gig, and have to big Prasad adieu.

Heck, the new job might pay as much as $20 a script! What giddy heights such naked wealth would take me.

I would feel disloyal if I didn’t at least give Prasad 60 scripts before parting company, though. And who knows, by the time he animates all of them, I might be free again.

Assuming there is something out there for me, of course.

I certainly feel qualified to tackle any sort of script writing work. And some other sorts of creative writing type work if the pay is right.

I no longer feel that “I’ll write anything! Just give me a chance!” fervor that I felt fresh out of VFS. I don’t know if that’s just because I have grown soft and jaded or because summer has a way of beating all the ambition out of me and making me feel lazy and languid and self-indulgent.

All I want to do is have fun, god dammit. To feel free. Free to go out into the world and drink in its pleasures and find the joy in life.

Instead, I still feel trapped in my tiny existence. Getting paid work has helped, but what I really need is some kind of radical breakthrough in therapy to reduce my burden of social anxiety to a point where I feel that special kind of freedom.

I still feel like I am not even allowed outside. Like just by being out there in the world, I am risking someone pointing me out like the people in that “you are not of the body” episode of the original Star Trek.

They’d point me out and say “What are you doing out here? You don’t belong here! How dare you step outside your cage, you disgusting beast! GO BACK NOW!”.

And the sad thing is, I’d be glad for the attention. And glad that someone care enough about me to yell at me.

I’m not used to that kind of validation.

That got dark real quick.

Realistically, I can’t see me making any radical improvements in my readiness to take on the real world any time soon. Not without some other thing to jump-start my ambition. My life is quite nice right now.

That kind of saps the will to change.

But I do want more out of life. I want to write for something that gets produced on a regular basis and with a minimum level of production values and professionalism. Something where I can be confident that I can write whatever I like and it will get done.

Something where I can at least earn minimum wage. And support myself.

Basically, my long term goal is to achieve the life of a kid just out of college. Which I am… sorta kinda not really.

Maybe when September rolls around and the air gets cooler and I start getting that “back to school” feeling, I will get my ambition back. will square my shoulders, push my cap forward at a jaunty yet determined angle, and set about making something of myself and maybe even finally getting the sort of Hollywood life I have always dreamed of for myself.

But none of that movie star bullshit.

No, I would want to be a highly paid and in-demand television writer who everyone wants to write for their new show and I get to pick and choose the projects that I think look promising and fun to work on.

And to eventually be able to create and produce my own shows and build a brand that means top notch quality just like my hero Walt Disney did.

Top notch quality, superb production, excellent writing, and at the heart of it all, a warm and giving heart that looks to shine some sunshine into people’s lives and make them feel better about themselves and the world.

To reach out and touch all those lonely people who feel like they are on the outside looking in, and invite them in, and tell them that there is nothing wrong with them and that they deserve love too.

If I am lucky, I will also make them feel like they have it.

That’s my highest ambition. To do what Disney did. To make things that have just a little bit of magic in them, the kind that fills you with wonder,. delight, and affection.

This life can be pretty damned hard, especially for us misfits.

I want to make it a little easier for them, and me, and everyone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Damn I love that song. Madonna at her finest.

I’ve been pondering my particular form of articulacy lately, and how it informs how I have lived my life.

In particular, I have been considering what I am calling my Awaiting Input mode. This is a passive listening mode I enter when I don’t understand what is going on and I am waiting for someone to explain things to me.

This mode made sense when I was a kid. Three older siblings plus Mom and Dad meant I basically had five parents and in general, there was always someone around to explain things to me, or at the very least whom I could ask.

Being the nerdy family that we were, everyone was happy to share knowledge with me. I mean, what nerd doesn’t love playing teacher to a receptive and respectful audience?

So far so good. But this lead me to expect a level of articulacy from the world that was wildly unrealistic. Luckily, I developed some very strong deductive capacities and thus got pretty good at figuring things out on my own.

But that Awaiting Input mode never left me, and there was always a second mode to it which was to demand someone explain things to me when I got confused or overwhelming. Maybe demand isn’t the right word….

Whine until I got it. Hey, when you’re the lastborn, whining in a legitimate survival strategy, and one of the only forms of power you have.

The thing is, outside the cozy intellectual environs of my family, this is not going to work. Most people are not articulate enough, nor do they understand me well enough, to be able to answer my questions.

There’s also the question of IQ. The average person isn’t smart enough for the questions either. That’s why my questions (and observations and so on) have so often led to that blank stare moment that makes me feel so brutally disconnected and embarrassed and like I am a gross bizarre alien.

I try so hard to relate. But it’s a case of different worlds.

From their point of view, my questions et al are so outside of their consciousness that they just can’t make the leap. It’s not just that they don’t know the answer to the question or don’t understand what I am talking about.

It’s far worse than that. In truth, they do not understand anything that would lead to such a question or thought. It’s so far outside their existence that it might as well be coming from an alien. One that knows the English language but lacks theory of mind.

That alien would be me.

And that sorta segues into my next point, because my whining for clarity response is basically one of anger mixed with panic, and that leads to feeling like the world owes me an explanation.

Not consciously, of course. On a conscious level, the thought is laughably absurd. But on a deep level, I am still waiting for someone to explain things to me.

And that causes me to get angry when people can’t articulate their thoughts. It’s unenlightened to the extreme, and doesn’t jive well with my egalitarian views of a pluralistic inclusive world where nobody is made to feel bad for their lack of one ability or another because we all have our own set of gifts and ways to contribute.

The thing is, I have never had a problem putting my thoughts into words. It’s always been simplicity itself for me, more or less. The words are there, I just have to say them. There’s been moments when I couldn’t figure out how to get across what I was trying to get across^[1], but they are rare and generally involve such high level and nuanced thoughts that it’s entirely possible nobody has ever put them into words in the entire history of the spoken word.

I might be letting my ego run away with me there,. But hey. It’s possible.

And because I have always had this articulacy, the lazy monkey in me can’t understand why other people don’t just spit it out already.

I mean, the words are right there. All you have to do is say them. Right?

But that’s an ignorant and intellectually lazy falsehood based on a very poor theory of mind. The words are not simply there to be spoken for most people. They actually have to think about how to say what they are trying to say. And if, in order to say it, they have to travel to some bizarre and distant intellectual territory because I have dragged them there, then they are going to have an even harder time.

Their lives are smaller and simpler than mine. Sometimes I envy them for that. My inability to be content without answers is something that I see as a useful byproduct of an unhealthy mind that never feels entirely safe and therefore must constantly be on the move, exploring, hunting, defending, like an army awaiting attack.

Oh, it’s coming. Believe me.

And I respect that everyone is different and I firmly believe that it is I who is exceptional and not they who are deficient. I’m an outlier. They are not.

But it still makes it very hard for me to relate to average people because my mind balks at the very notion of so limited a view of the world, and refuses to imagine it.

And when I try to force it, I get that queasy, dizzy feeling I always get when I contemplate taking a superior role to others. It makes me acutely uncomfortable, which is why it has been so hard for me to truly accept the truth of the enormity of my intellect relative to the average human.

Because if I truly accepted it, I would also have to accept responsibility for it.

Because if there’s one thing every Spider-man fan knows, it’s that with great power comes great responsibility.

And I don’t know if I can handle that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.