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.)