That title is my way of admitting that I have no idea what to write about tonight in my signature “honest yet oddly endearing” style.

It’s a great combo if you can pull it off. But be warned – what you see in this space is the product of many many years honing a particular persona and if you choose to try to emulate it, do not expect similar results right away.

In other words, “Professional driver on closed track. Do not attempt. ”

It’s always going to bug me a little that “don’t try this at home” type warnings are viewed as necessary. I was a kid when the whole “imitatable acts” cases went through, and I never bought the whole notion that children’s TV programs should be held accountable for some dumb kid getting hurt because he was imitating He-Man’s powerup sequence and got hit by lightning.

Well, okay, that never happened, but still.

If Little Timmy (or Tammy) falls off the stoop and cracks their wrist while pretending to be their favorite cartoon hero, that has nothing to do with the cartoon. It could just as easily been a passage from the Bible they were imitating, or even something straight from their own fertile imaginations.

And it takes a very special kind of twisted, impacted, super entitled middle class mindset to even try to blame the cartoon for what the kid did. To me, it has always seemed like a combination of the hysterical NIMBY parent feeling guilty about letting the child get hurt and a completely and total inability to take responsibility for one’s actions if doing so conflicts with that great rush of righteous anger that comes with throwing the blame on an outside force, however dishonestly.

I mean, what kind of person does something like that?

Being mad is so much more fun that parenting!

Had a bit of a cock up on the job front. Apparently, I was so tired and spaced out when I did my episode last night that I totally forgot to actually send it to Prasad.

And I did not realize it until this evening, so it was very late. Technically. I doubt he would have looked at it before Monday anyway, but still.; I goofed up.

And you know what? Whatever. The only workable solution to the way I freak out over these things is to immediately relegate them to the past and move on. Exoriating mtself over them is counterproductive, to put it mildly, and so I am better off just taking it philosophically, even when that makes me seem like an irresponsible dickwad to other people in my life.

It’s not that I don’t care and it’s not that I am not sorry. It’s just that dwelling on it for any period of time leads to very bad things for me, and I have to start that particularly energetic downward spiral by nipping it in the bud the moment it begins.

I don’t like that it has come to this, but I see no other route. My only consolation is that I am confident that it will be a temporary stepping stone towards getting the sort of sold sense of self-worth that can weather dealing with my own failures without it initiating a total cascade failure of self-loathing in my fragile psyche.

It’s hard to be me. I don’t recommend it. Would not incarnate thusly again.

Actually, I don’t have it all that bad. I have loads of talent and intelligence, I have safe and stable life circumstances, I have a tiny but steady gig as a writer, and I have a Skyrim habit that brings me many hours of fun every single day.

It might not seem like much from society’s point of view, and there’s a lot of people who would call me a loser. But I don’t care. All I care about is enjoying the life I have and letting other drives work their way to the fore before making any big decisions based on an arbitrary cluster of “shoulds”.

One voice getting louder every day as how dissatisfied I am with my writing for Prasad lately, and how the work itself isn’t really doing it for me any more.

As my father would say, I really outsmarted myself on that point. I gave Prasad my ultimatum without even considering the fact that if he accepted my terms, that meant I had no choice but to keep doing the work.

D’oh! So I figure I will keep going for twenty or thirty more episodes, or maybe 35 more so that I hit 100, and then reevaluate.

I’d like to think that I will also look for other work during that period, but I have to be realistic about my energy levels. Or maybe the right term would be “wherewithal reserves”. I only have so much energy I can devote to trying to change the envelope which defines me, and I have to strike when that reserve peaks.

Until then, no pressure, whatever. Maybe I will suddenly get inspired and spend an afternoon on UpWork applying for things I’d enjoy. Maybe I will do nothing of the sort and end up just playing more Skyrim. I couldn’t really say.

But both are fine. I am currently getting through life without a lot of pain, worry, fear, strife, or chaos, and so if that continues, fab.

And if that leads to my reaching the point where I am ready to reach out and strive to make it to the next level of growth and achieve a superior equilibrium, that’s awesome too. Both are good.

What is important is that I keep fighting to learn how to lead a natural life, free of corrosive self-consciousness and n-dimensional paranoia so I can simply be myself and trust that will be enough.

I get closer every day. Now and then I remove another of my radical self-consciojusness and move cloer to living in harmony with myself in the world. Eventually, I will have ripped out all the unnecessary superconscious machinery that does nothing but sap my clock cycles and my will to live, and then I will be free to life life with the carefree attitude and easy self-confidence I had when I was a preschooler.

I can picture this new version of me so clearly in my mind.

And if I can do that, I can make it real.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, a quick recap of previous thinking :

Let’s talk about Plato’s Cave.

The basic idea is that what we think of as reality is actually just shadows cast by the perfect and unchanging “true” reality which lies outside the cave.

The philosopher’s job, according to Plato (he might have been biased) is to go outside the cave and observe this “true” reality, then come back in to the cave and explain to the rest of us what they have learned.

It’s hard, because most people don’t even know they are in a cave. They think what they see in the shadows is reality. So when you try to share your wisdom from beyond the cave to them, they look at you like you are crazy.

There’s a lot of problems with this metaphor, like all that essentialist “true” reality bullshit. But I like how well it describes the relationship between the philosopher and society, and how problematic it can be.

Myself, I feel like I left the cave and never truly came back. Instead, I got comfortable out there, and began to prefer it to the cramped, smoky, and dingy interior of the cave. Eventually I just plain moved out of the cave, and it became a place I visited as little as possible, much to my detriment.

I would love to say that this move was made out of disgust with the grunting farting hordes and a determination to find my own path and all that kind of rugged individualist shinola, but the truth is that it happened because I couldn’t handle actual reality. The one we all live in and in which all that is real exists.

The world of thought was much easier for me to deal with. The world of contemplation. The world of advanced reasoning. The world of the quest for truth.

The world of sitting there thinking about stuff, more or less. A perfect activity for the socially isolated intellectual.

And because of this social isolation, my reality was never truly socially constrained. I have never been one to accept limitations willingly and I had no real stake in the social world (more’s the pity), so for me, the socially constructed reality that most people live in was just a small subset of the much larger reality I perceived.

Western thought, at this point, would give me a big old pat on the back for having transcended the small minded limitations of blinkered reality to stand on my own as a fearless pursuer of the truth.

But that only makes sense if there was something to transcend. But because of how early in my development this detachment occurred, there was never anything for me to transcend. I could never be the rugged intellectual hero standing atop a pile of slain illusions and crying out my triumphant victory in a clear strong voice.

Instead, I was this person hovering in midair looking at his fellow human beings and wondering why he has such trouble relating to them.

It was because I could fly. Or, less metaphorically, it was because I could enter or leave their reality whenever I chose. To me, it was very clear that a lot of the social machinery that drives society is entirely voluntary and therefore I could easily defy it by refusing to cooperate with it.

In real terms,. this gave me something like magic powers. But not the kind that lets you be a superhero or gains you respect and helps you to meet people and make friends.

More the kind that makes people fear you because you are both powerful beyond their comprehension and so very clueless that they can’t trust that you won’t hurt them with your bizarre and disturbing powers.

Add in the fact that everything else about you is low-status due to your shy and fragile nature, and the stage is set for people dealing with their fear and emotional disturbance about you by punishing you for it and trying to drive you away.

In other words. bullying.

And there you are, the innocent wizard, wondering why you can’t get along with others, while all the time going in and out of their reality and effortlessly transcending the rules that form the basis of their entire reality.

That’s a really fucking weird thing to be able to do. Especially when you don’t even know you are doing it.

And by you, as always, I mean me.

This social detachment robbed me of a lot of very important social lessons. Like how to emit the right social signals to reassure people that you are safe to be around despite your weird powers. Signals that say “I might be strange, but rest assured, I understand enough of your world to make sure I don’t upset you or trample on your beliefs”.

Nobody want to associate with a clumsy yet powerful wizard.

It’s just not safe.

What’s more, the limitations placed on us as children become the internalized structure that acts like a skeleton, supporting the rest of your psyche as you go through life.

When someone like me does not have anyone to impose those limitations, both because nobody is paying attention and because my mental strength made limiting me very hard, they end up with a weak and unstructured adult psyche.

That’s good for creativity but bad for sanity, happiness, and not getting trampled on by life because it is hard and you are goo.

At this point in my life, I am not sure what to do about these issues. It would be very hard for me to learn how to send those reassuring signals. Possible, but difficult.

And part of me doesn’t really want to. That’s my angrily defiant id saying “fuck them if they can’t take it. I’m going to be myself and force the world to deal with it. ”

That’s not exactly a very liberal position. But I will need to move in that direction if I am to form some kind of a stable identity that can act as that long delayed skeleton for my psyche and maybe bring some kind of stability to my inner life.

It might not be the ideal solution.

But it’s what I have to work with.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yes, we’re back on that subject again. And once more, right after therapy.

I brought it up in therapy because I felt I needed some extra help processing the whole thing, and well, that’s a big part of what therapy is for, in my never all that humble opinion. Getting help with the processing.

I talked about how I feel like truly embracing my mental power would pull me even further away from others into this airlessly intellectual inner aerie where I would finally go completely insane from lack of human connection.

Perhaps I cling so hard to my delusions of minor normalcy for precisely that reason.

That, and the fact that the alternatives do not appeal to me. When I try to imagine actually thinking of myself as massively intelligent and way smarter than the average person, the best case scenario I can think of is to take a lovingly and gently paternalistic attitude towards my fellow human beings.

Look at them like a parent looks at a child, with great love coupled by the knowledge that they are weaker and more fragile than I am, and I must protect them and treat them gently or they might get hurt.

That’s the best case scenario. Other scenarios include declaring that I am going to do as giants do and the pygmies can take  care of themselves. I’d be like an intellectual Godzilla, massive in power and size, and my atomic breath would be my razor sharp wit and deadly sarcasm.

Or I could embrace misanthropy, like so many others in my situation. Declare that the continuing stupidity of humanity make them unfit for my help, and pointedly withdraw from any humanitarian efforts, and spend my time concentrating on makiing my own life as pleasant and pain free as possible.

But even the crustiest of curmudgeons needs some way to connect with their fellow human beings. It’s a basic need, like food, and being an angry fussy eater does not exempt your from your need for nutrition.

Oh, and of course, going full supervillain crazy is always an option too, with delusions of grandeur and madly manic periods where I feel like I am the smartest person there will ever be and it’s my destiny to be the one and only true saviour of humanity who will drag them kicking and screaming into a new enlightened age.

In other words, conquer the world and remake it in my image because that’s the only way to make sure things are done right.

Anyhow. I guess I am still looking for that way to integrate my knowledge of my intellectual prowess into my self-image. How to be both smart and happy, more or less.

What really scares me is the contempt. I feel like if I was to embrace the true scope and might of my intellect, I would view most of the rest of the human race with sneering contempt at what a bunch of drooling zombies they all are.

I don’t want to go there. But it flows from the big brain and ego thing. It’s very hard to look down at people from Olympian heights without… well, looking down on them.

Which touches on another issue : how to have a big brain without getting a swelled head. The ego thing. I can’t imagine having a big powerful brain that puts me way above most other people (family and friends excluded) without coming to the conclusion that I am goddamned amazing and people should be glad when I so much as pay attention to them because I have such enormous thoughts to think.

In this, I am very human. Our sense of social hierarchy is so strong that we can’t imagine being far more powerful than others without concluding that this means we are the alpha of alphas, the capo de capo, the biggest dog in the doghouse.

And that, in turn, has a tendency to turn people into assholes.

Power corrupts, after all.

All of this would not be a problem if I was better at connecting with others. Said connection would help keep me grounded in the real world so that I don’t float off into the sky to be lost forever.

I’ve had nightmares like that.

But sadly, I am not so well moored. And I don’t know how to fix that. I know what would do it – finding a milieu in which I feel totally comfortable and accepted and relaxed – but I don’t know if such a place even exists.

And if it does, I have this uncomfortable feeling that it would involve me being in charge of everything and it all revolving around my needs.

Doesn’t get much more oral retentive than that.

But no, I suppose it could be a position of harmonious equality as long as I felt values and respected and included there.

And that, of course, has a hell of a lot more to do with me and my issues than any kind of external factor.

I have so much pain, fear, mistrust, and latent rage that comes between me and others. The simplest of social situations sets off a hyperdimensional vortex of emotions and issues in my mind, leaving me numb , confused, and weak for reasons utterly opaque to those of you living outside my head.

And that’s most of you.

Under those circumstances, it is impossible for me to be emotionally open. Picking up on nonverbal social cues is also very difficult. Too much of my mind is preoccupied with managing and suppressing my inner fireworks for me to do anything but rather limply try to keep up with the conversation.

And if I am in a room full of young people, I can’t even do that.

The textbook thing for people like me in such circumstance is to declare most people to be idiots and thus unworthy of your attention.

In other words, sour grapes.

But I can’t do that. I am too honest with myself to externalize my issues onto others when I know damned well that it’s me that is different, not them.

And yet. I can’t imagine embracing my intellect without ending up there.

Guess I’m just not smart enough to figure it out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think that part of the natural burden that comes with high IQ, especially when it is coupled with an expansive mind like mind, is that you see further and deeper than others. And don’t get me wrong, there can be huge advantages to that.

But when you are a utilitarian humanist like myself, you often feel like Cassandra, able to see the dangers coming but not being able to convince anyone of their reality. So you feel helpless against the tide of doom.

There is also a form of paranoia unique to the farsighted. It comes from that Cassandra feeling, and manifests as a feeling that you have to be looking for danger everywhere at all times because you’re stuck being the advanced scout for your herd and it is your your job to look down all possible paths to make sure the herd doesn’t end up blundering off a cliff or running directly into the jaws of a lion.

And sometimes, in moments of sadness or frustration, we might find ourselves envying the blinkered point of view of the average human being. They don’t see what you see. They don’t worry like you worry. They can just live their lives never looking at the path ahead, just getting through the day, assuming everything will be OK.

But you know, in your heart, that your mind could never fit into such a tiny space,. and that if everything does continue to be OK for the majority, it will be because of people like you clearing the path ahead.

As patient readers know, I have always seen and understood more than was probably good for me. I could tell when people were being insincere. I could see the difference between what they said and what they meant. I understood where people were coming from. I wasn’t consciously aware of this ability until I was in grade 4 or 5, but it was always there. And that alone robbed me of a certain kind of innocence.

It also made me more humanist as well because I could see how people struggle and how even unpleasant people had their reasons for being that way and how none of us get through life without heartache and pain.

Every person you have ever been jealous of is dealing with burdens you can never understand. Every person who seems to “have it all” is acutely aware of how much more to life there is than that. Every rich and powerful person is, like ourselves, an incomplete animal looking for love and connection and validation.

It’s a well-rounded perspective that gives me a very deep level of feeling for the humanity in all of us. To understand is to forgive, not because you are a bad person if you have hostile feelings towards anyone, but because when you look beneath the masks people wear, you always see another confused monkey trying to find the door into happiness just like you.

To me, that is the heart and soul of humanism – that looking beneath the surfaces we project and recognizing how fragile and vulnerable we all are.

This perspective on life often wins plaudits from people because it sounds so good, but when people try to apply it to their own lives,. they give it up pretty fast because  they are comfortable with their hatreds, resentments, and perceptions of others and to change that would be to change how they look at everything.

It’s a struggle. I have been wrestling with it my whole life, and I find it very hard sometimes. Part of me wishes I could be that blinkered member of the herd and act from emotion and stop trying to figure everything out all the time.

But there is no way to shrink a broadened mind short of brain trauma. You have outgrown your previous point of view, and trying to return to it is like trying to fit into the clothes you wore as a child.

It just plain won’t work.

It can be seen as a conflict between my humanitarianism and my humanity. The high holy ethics of true, deep humanitarianism must coexist with my being a stumbling naked monkey just like everyone else.

As attractive as the prospect might be, there is no way to leave your earthly self behind and move in with your higher ethics.

And some of the most dangerous people in the world are those who have convinced themselves that they have done so, because that makes them stop questioning themselves and holding themselves accountable.

Yup. Just like Donald Trump.

I have completely forgotten what I set out to talk about.

Oh right, the dangers of being a visionary.

The dangers can be dealt with. Developing a solid set of limits to how much responsibility you bear helps. I am working on that myself.

I’ve never been fond of barriers between me and others, but as it turns out, you need them in order to keep yourself together.

Forgiving yourself for being human is another big part of it. That’s much harder than recognizing the humanity you share with others. From a humanist point of view, the flaws and imperfections of others can be downright endearing.

But the judgements we lay upon ourselves are much harder to forgive because they become part of our identity, and changes in identity can seem like death to people.

Remember, whenever a butterfly is born, a caterpillar dies.

So we resist self-forgiveness instinctively. It’s too big a change for a lot of people, myself included. We can sense that to forgive oneself would change everything about how we view the world and ourselves, and because we are unable to imagine what that would be like, we view it as chaos and madness and horrible, and resist it.

How much healthier would we be if we all understand that it is impossible to stop being yourself? The real you… your core identity… is unchanging and immutable. New information can no more change who you really are than it can change you into a cheetah. You always have been and will always be yourself.

All that can happen is that you learn more about yourself. And while some of that is bound to be bad news and lead to the death of who you thought you were, the real you will still be there.

In fact, it will have grown.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I am finally going to get around to talking about procrastination.

But first, a quick personal update : I got my raise! No argument, no pushback, just a message from my boss saying that I would be paid $60 for this week’s 4 scripts.

I didn’t have to write one yesterday, because it was Labour Day.

I just had to add the word “labour” to my computer’s automatic spellcheck. The quiet battle for Canadian identity continues. now and forever.

I don’t know yet about my other demand, which was to work directly with the rest of the team. We will see.

I just feel all sparkly good about myself because I stood up for myself and it worked.

Anyhow, back to putting things off.

We all know that procrastination is a bad habit. We know it only makes things worse for us in the long run. We all kick ourselves for the lazy dumbasses we are when we panic because it’s the last minute and we still haven’t done that thing yet and now we have to do a really half-assed job really fast, even though we have had tons of time to do the thing. But no, we pussied out and kept putting it off, and now we’re fucked.

And that’s a very unpleasant experience. And we know it’s easily avoidable and yet we also know it will happen again. Once the crisis is over, we’ll forget all about it, and go back to putting things off.

But why? What makes later seem better than now? Clearly, we would be better off doing our things as soon as we get them. It’s the same amount of work either way, and if we do them ASAP, we can forget all about them and relax instead of having them looming over our heads for literally the maximum amount of time.

And yet, we keep on doing it. Let’s talk about why.

The key here is avoidance, which for the purpose of this blog entry I will define as “dealing with stressful things by dodging them instead of dealing with them”.

We’re all guilty of it now and then. But for the kind of people for whom procrastination is a serious problem (like myself), avoidance is our primary defense mechanism against stressful situations. Our instinctual response to a rise in stress is to detach from the situation as soon as possible, and the easiest and fastest way to do it is to shove all thoughts of the stressful thing out of our minds, thus returning to the eerily placid state of mind that we prefer.

It’s a classic bit of short term thinking. But it’s not really thinking, is it? It’s a gut level emotional response, as simple and thoughtless as a reflex.

Every day, we face the choice of doing what we know we’re supposed to do right away to get over it and punting it downfield to the future and thus happily screwing over our future selves, who will resent us greatly for it.

We make the bad choice – procrastination – because it’s easier and it resolves the emotional issue immediately.

So how does one go from being a procrastinating full to being a take-charge go-getter who is always on top of their lives and thus masters (and mistresses) of their own fate?

Beats me. If I knew, I wouldn’t have to write about it in order to figure it out.

I know that is involves a deep and subtle but profound change of attitude towards life. And that will require building up your mental muscle, particularly your intelligent self-interest preservation muscles.

That is the muscle that you use when you actively choose the better-for-you option instead of the immediate-gratification option. Like a physical muscle, it gets stronger from use and making the right choice gets easier over time.

But that’s not a first-level solution. It only begs the question, “and how does one do that? How does one get to a mental place where one can do that?”

And therein lies the rub, because no matter how you look at it, if you are serious about improving your habits, then you have to do what you really don’t want to do, and that is dealing with things.

It’s a choice only you can make. It starts with choosing to stay in the moment of stress instead of skating away as fast as you can. It will feel very unnatural and wrong at first, but if you stick with it, it becomes easier over time.

That doesn’t mean you have to immediately jump from procrastination to hyper competence. That is never going to happen. Instead, all that is required is that when you feel this urge to push things away, pause for a moment. Do it one second later.

This gives your mind an extra moment to digest the thought and that will reduce the scariness of the thought and interrupt the process of merely slapping a huge label that says “LATER” on it and shoving it right back out the door.

It’s basically a desensitizing technique. It will gradually convince your inner emotional matrix that things are not as bad or scary as you once thought, and that these things can be dealt with sooner than usual without it being a horrible experience.

This will involve a certain degree of inner monitoring. You have to catch yourself in the act, so to speak. And you might not be the sort of person who likes doing that.

Well, too bad. Doing so is vital to any kind of cognitive therapy, and cognitive therapy is the most effective kind of therapy, so…. buck up and do it.

Of course, I am only describing a method. You will have to apply it yourself. I can’t make you do it. Nobody can. It’s entirely up to you. Not because everyone is trying to force you to learn some kind of harsh lesson. Because it is literally physically impossible for me to climb inside your head and run your life for you.

And if you think that sounds unfair and that I am just being a meanie, then you really need to grow the fuck up.

It’s all up to you. It’s always been up to you. It will always be up to you. You are the only person who can live your life and make your choices.

Childhood ends. That can’t be helped.

But refusing to face the truth of your own autonomy and thus your responsibility for your own outcomes only makes things way worse.

You can be happy.

But it’s going to take some work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m still playing Skyrim. But I am beginning to wonder why.

Not that that game has changed at all. It’s as awesome as ever. But I have been playing it in nearly all of my copious downtime for months now, and it’s wearing thing .

When I play, part of me is having fun and getting into getting various things done and so on. That is still, as of this moment the larger part of me.

But the other part of me has been growing increasingly frustrated and disgusted and anxious as I play, and really wants to play ANYTHING else.

So why do I keep playing?

Because I have a lot of trouble letting go, basically.

Right now, I think I am mostly still playing out of a desire to not have to return to the world where I have to figure out what to do with myself all day again.

Between that and nostalgia for how much I used to enjoy playing it plus my life long compulsion to do things I have planned to do puts me in this weird bind.

Hence the title of this entry. It’s like I finished the lollipop ages ago but I am still sucking on the stick because it was a really good lollipop and I don’t want to let go of that.

But the taste in my mouth gets sourer and sourer and sooner or later, that will force me to let go whether I want to or not.

And afterwards, I will admonish myself for holding on so long to something that so clearly has stopped providing enjoyment when I would have been far better off looking for something new and fresh.

It’s a very un-pragmatist thing to do. But even I have to admit – and I can say this, you can’t – sometimes pragmatism isn’t very practical.

My inner logic demon demands that I clarify : logically speaking, it is impossible for the pragmatic to be impractical because there is no way for anything that does not “work” can be considered a pragmatic solution.

So all I am really saying is that false notions of the pragmatic thing to do can be very impractical. One of the biggest strengths of the pragmatic mindset is its laser focus on results. If it doesn’t lead to a working solution, it’s un-pragmatic, period.

I’m starting to repeat myself. Let’s move on.

So yes, I will admonish myself and firmly resolve to never do it again.

But it will happen again. Over and over. Until the root cause, fear of facing the unending fractal maze of possibility that is the real world has ceased to be.

It’s very much a Taurus thing, this inability to let go of things. I am pretty sure that the sun sign Taurus must be disproportionately represented amongst hoarders. Our primal mission is to accumulate value, and that can lead not just to hoarding and a tendency to hold on to things for far too long, but also a drastic over-sensitivity to loss.

Just the thought of losing what we have accumulated is enough to make us break out in a cold and very paranoid threat. I am sure that we are a big part of the “prepper” community as well for just that reason. It’s a case of backwards justifying a compulsion to stockpile and preserve.

Because if the world is not coming to an end, why do I have so many cans of peas?

That’s why I have always worried about what would happen if someone tried to mug me. I know that I absolutely could not hand over the money. That’s emotionally impossible for me. That means I would have to fight back, and that could get me killed, because as wily and unpredictable and tricky as I can be, I am still old and fat and slow and no match for a sufficiently determined young person.

I’m not saying I would definitely lose.

I’m just saying that I would be compelled to take a highly uncharacteristic risk.

There’s also a strong possibility that if I did win, I would beat the ever loving shit out of the young person, in a wildly disproportionate way because now my latent rage has an outlet, and I would end up being the bad guy because of it.

And hey, it’s my word against their that they even tried to mug me. And they are going to come out as far more guy-level sympathetic than I will.

Anyhow, back to the topic.

One astrologer I read said that learning to let go was every Taurus’ primary spiritual challenge in life. And that makes sense to me. Hitting the snooze button on life and ignoring the evidence of your own sense and emotions because you don’t want to return to the uncertainties of life certainly fits the bill there.

Obviously, a healthy life requires both accumulation and letting go. Sometimes you have to separate the wheat from the chaff and throw the chaff away. Sometimes trying to keep it all leads to losing it all. Sometimes getting rid of bad stuff is the best way to improve the overall quality.

Sometimes you have to cut off the leg to save the patient.

But real life is rarely so clear cut. True, it’s easy to say that this sort of clinging behaviour is unhealthy and needs to be curtailed, but that’s just the saying of it.

In and of itself, it does nothing to solve the problem, nor does it even hint at a possible solution to it.

And as long as I am so needy and insecure because I don’t feel safe on a deep psychological level, I will likely continue to cling. To avoid the harsh reality of change for as long as possible via an aggressive and muscular kind of denial, and secretly hope that the choice will be taken out of my hands by things falling apart on their own. To try to find a happy place and then just stay there, even though I know that is impossible.

Clearly, something has to change.

But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling rather bleh at the moment. Just woke up from some of that hyper intense REM state sleep that always leaves me  feeling all disoriented and messed up.

Right now, my head is full of cobwebs, I feel dizzy and confused, my head hurts, I am having a lot of trouble focused on what I am doing, and I feel a slight tingle all through my body that is a sure sign that I have not been getting my recommended daily allowance of oxygen due to my untreated sleep apnea.

Sleep hurts me sometimes. That’s not supposed to happen. That’s not right.

I’ll try not to go off on one of my “why can’t I take care of myself properly” ranting ruminations. Because depression, that’s why.

Depression makes self-care very difficult, especially for someone who was neglected as a child like myself. There is only so much I can do and that amount varies from day to day and moment to moment.

It all flows from that terror of leaving my tiny little hidey hole of retreat from the world inside my head. Anything that involves me leaving my tiny comfort zone activates my deep anxiety and the clock starts ticking on how long I can fight that deep anxiety before I have to yank my tentacles back and close my shell for a while.

Yeah it’s a weird image. Those happen here.

I’ve thought about the tentacle thing before. Not in the ecchi hentai schoolgirl orifice invasion sense, but as a metaphor for my approach to life. At all times I stay in my comfort zone deep inside my mind, and deal with life via extending cautious tentacles into the real world, always ready to haul them back in like fishing line on an automatic reel the second something makes my anxiety level exceed its very low trigger point.

On a good day,. I am willing to come out of my shell a little in order to get what I want or to take advantage of something good. But for the most part, anything too far away from my timid tentacles to reach is simply not possible for me.

I’m just too damned scared/

That is the source of all my “I just can’t” moments, where I can’t do something and can’t explain why .The real answer would be, I suspect, something like “because my depression won’t let me” or “because that scares me and I don’t know why” or, I supposed, “because my tentacles aren’t long enough yet”, although that answer would probably get a few strange looks.

To put it mildly.

Growth and recovery, for the likes of me, comes from pushing myself to stretch those tentacles out further than they have ever gone before, maybe even taking a few steps out of my usual anchor point.

If all goes well, what I get out of it is proof that exceeding my limits does not always lead to instant catastrophe and regret and self-excoriation over how stupid I am for having done something I “know” is a bad idea.

If it goes badly, of course, that catastrophe happens. My anxiety explodes like a fucking hand grenade and all I can think of is surrender and/or retreat.

Whatever lets me go back to my teeny tiny comfort zone and lick my wounds and wait for my anxiety level to slowly go down to the point where I can feel safe.

Well, as safe as I ever feel, anyhow. An acceptable minimal state of panic equivalent to my usual level of background panic.

Those are the stakes. I might get a littler better or I might feel a lot worse for a while. I never forget that extending my limits is good for me, but that won’t matter if my red alert condition is triggered and I am helpless to fight the raging storm inside me.

That said, I have made a lot of progress over the last couple of years, and that comfort zone is bigger and stronger than ever. And I have gotten a lot better at weathering the storms by reminding myself that it’s only weather and it will pass and after that I will be warm and dry on solid ground once more.

But it’s still a tentacle based world for me. In a sense, getting the writing gig that I did made me backtrack some because I could work for… well, not a living, but for money, anyhow – from the comfort of my computer and not have to deal with the world at all besides sending my script to Prasad every working weekday.

Oh, I pulled the trigger on that, by the way. Along with my 60th episode, I messaged him that I wanted a raise from $10/episode to $15/episode. And that I wanted to work directly with the animator(s) and Ryan, our voice actor.

I am positive that if I can work with them directly via some robust online collaboration platform, I can improve the quality of our little toons ten times over.

Here’s one of the latest ones :

Ugh. The “automatic” lip syncing is terrible, the timing my my jokes is all wrong, and the whole thing comes across as amateurish, clumsy, and laaaame.

At least, from my point of view. If you thoroughly enjoyed that, god bless you, but from my side of the screen, it is not good enough, damn it., not good enough.

I have mentally quoted that line like a thousand times when I am fed up and my controlling urge is on the rampage.

That’s why I am very reluctant to actually watch the things. It pains me to see my words go wrong like that and makes me feel acutely embarrassed about being associated with such shoddy work.

When I ignore the videos, I can be the faithful writer who just writes the thing, submits it, and collects his paycheck.

But if I watch them, when I obsess over the final product and that is not good for me.

Working directly with the team is the only solution, as far as I can tell. Well, either that, or get my own account on GoAnimate.com and make the fucking things myself.

And let me tell you, I ma very tempted to do just that.

Maybe I will.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the thing.

All my life, I have had this sense of power. A feeling that enormous latent energies lie within me and that I am a person of extraordinary gifts who could really have an impact on the world. My mind crackles and sizzles with the kind of energy that average people can barely even dream about. I’m also highly creative, a very nice person, and I have no problem letting other people shine.

In short, there’s a rela chance that I might be an awesome human being.

And that scares the hell out of me.

In in tonight’s entry, we’re going to try to figure out why.

On the surface it makes no sense. It’s like being born rich and being afraid of your own money, or having natural athletic gifts and hiding them from everyone.

I’m in a position most people would envy in terms of natural gifts. But for all the time I have felt that sense of power, I have feared it. That caused me to ignore the information that comes with this feeling of power, and when pressed to dismiss it as something that didn’t matter and/or didn’t count.

It’s like there is me, and there is It. I’m the sweet, funny, lovable nerd and It is some kind of terrifyingly brutal machine that works for me, but strictly under the table.

Scares the hell out of people just the same, though.

I am sure that at least part of it is a fear of the responsibility that comes with so much power. I have a strange relationship with responsibility – part of me welcomes it and part of me avoids it like it was radioactive mutant cancer.

And the level of responsibility implied by my gifts terrifies me. It gives me the feeling of being trapped in my mind’s gravity well about to be chocked  by the life a responsible person should have if they are gifted like me.

My god, it even implies that I should be doing something with my life. Fuck THAT.

That leads to what I feel might be a real issue here : the feeling that if I embrace this power of mine, it will tank me out of the warm comfortable socket of my life and rag me kicking and screaming into the light.

And despite all my talk about wanting to walk in the sun again, the thought of being pulled out of my comfortable little hidey hole and forced to account for myself scares the living daylights out of me.

I take great comfort in my social invisibility. At the same time, I constantly complain that nobody notices me.

What I’m saying is that I am a complicated guy.

As I have been contemplating this subject, the outline of a science fiction ish short story has formed in my mind. It would be about a world where the government is constantly looking for high IQ people in order to take them, by force if necessary, into government service. Our hero would be someone with a high IQ who hides it for fear of being detected and indoctrinated and forced out of his comfortable low-status life.

The story would be about the day he is finally detected.

And sure enough, he is pulled out of his life, away from his friends and co-workers and everything else he knows, has all his clothes and possessions taken away from him,. and is given things “more in according with your new station in life”.

So there he is, in a grey funk, miserable in his weird new clothes in this weird government room around all these weird new people who are loud and efficient and always on the go, in this place where everything happens too fast or not at all, and all he wants in the world is to go back to his life and hide forever.

This sets the scene for a conversation between our hero and someone from the government whose job it is to convince him to go along with the whole thing willingly rather than making them use more force on him.

Eventually, he would learn that his new life is not so bad and that there are plenty of government jobs where he can truly help people, which is something he has always wanted to due.

There. Now I don’t have to write the damn thing.

And maybe another aspect of my fear is that my power seems so much bigger than me. And with so much force at its disposal, it’s like being at the controls of a massive machine you have no idea how to operate yet one wrong move could end in unthinkable disaster for everybody.

I suppose there is a social aspect of it too. I already have trouble relating with people without hanging a sign that says “super genius” around my neck.

I think the talking  version of the Warner Brothers’ Coyote did that once.

Perhaps I am in a form of deep denial. Part of me stubbornly insists that I am not that different from others and I can live in their world and be both like them and with them.

But I am a giant in a world full of pygmies (my friends and family excluded, natch) and that is possibly what frightens me the most. The idea of myself as Gulliver in Lilliput, desperately trying not to step on anyone, chills me to the core.

And yet,. it’s the truth. I am not like them. I’m not like anybody, really. Maybe I would be better off accepting that I am an alien amongst humans rather than rather lamely trying to blend in with them.

It’s a hard problem to solve. Denying a fundamental truth about oneself is always a recipe for disaster. And yet I can’t imagine truly owning up to my power. When I think about it, I feel myself pulling even further away from people until I lose all contact with the reality outside my mind.

That is my ultimate nightmare : the slender cord of my contact with reality finally snapping and leaving me trapped in my own mind.

That’s worse than being buried alive.

Because being buried alive ends.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

And blog entries without a subject.

That’s what happens when I blog before the Golden Hours between 6 pm and 8 pm. For some reason, that’s when the ideas for what to blog about come to me. Maybe they are my peak intellectual hours, I don’t know.

Not to make it sound like I am doing this arbitrarily. of course. I will be out in the evening. It’s now or never.

But if tonight’s blog entry seems even more disjointed and rambling than usual, now you will know why.

I’m improvising this whole thing.  Moreso than usual, even.

In my other life – my Skyrim life…. I played an Orc warrior for a while recently. Man, is the game easy when your whole battle strategy is “hit bad thing very hard with big stick”. And it works, because you’re big thick barbarian brute and the “big stick” is either a gigantic sword, an enormous mace (stick with pointy ball at end), or what the game calls a “warhammer” which is really just a sledgehammer with fancy styling.

I went with the sword for my big dude. It’s the fastest of the three.

And let me tell you, there is something primal and satisfying about being able to just walk up to the enemy and beat the shit out of. It was a welcome change from my previous attempt at the Dawnguard plot as an elven archer.

Being an archer in Skyrim basically sucks. Arrows have crappy range and damage and I hate having to constantly back up while firing arrows into the bad guy.

So I played that guy – I called him Ragnar Rageblood, because what the heck, might as well have fun with it – up to level 30 or so – long enough to complete the entire Dawnguard plot as a member of the Dawnguard.

Did not enjoy that. Well, did not enjoy the beginning and the end of that plotline, because the Dawnguard are genocidal maniacs who are dedicating their lives to killing every single vampire in Skyrim, without mercy, regardless of the character of the vampire.

And I am not down with that kind of hateful insanity.

The other way to play through the Dawnguard content is as a vampire, and that is WAY more fun. You get a bunch of special powers and can get more via doing a LOT of bloodsucking, you can turn into a Vampire Lord that has even more powers, you can glide unseen through the shadows of the night, and you have full permission to skulk around in a long black cape and nothing else.

That’s what I am going to due with my current character, a High Elf mage. Being a mage in Skyrim also sucks, but in a way that is far more complicated and irritating.

It’s been pretty rough going so far. I have my character built up to level 9 and his attack spells (he prefers lightning zappy type ones) is getting pretty strong, but his defenses are so weak that he dies pretty easily and that is very frustrating.

I am going to try to fix that after I become a vampire. If I can fix it, great, I will keep playing that character. But if not, I will likely create my NEXT idea for character, which can be summed up in one word : NINJA.

Like I have said in this space before. I am not temperamentally suited for stealth. I go at things directly, and I have very little patience for slow and indirect methods of attack.

So I have not explore the stealthy character options. And if the only option was to be a thief or some kind of crude assassin when you are pursuing the “stealthy” options.

Basically, in Skyrim, there’s the path of the Warrior, the Mage, and the Thief. The rest branches out from there. And I have explored many facets of both Mage and Warrior.

But not the thiefy stuff. Getting to be a badass stealthy ninja warrior is exciting enough to get me through my disinclination towards stealth. I am still not keen about sttealing, but being able to sneak up on my enemies before leaping from the shadows to take them by surprise appeals to me a lot.

Beware the shadows, my friend.

Becoming a ninja,  or as close as I can get to being one, will likely take a whole lot of mods and a fair bit of jiggery pokery. Luckily, I enjoy that kind of thing.

At least, I do when I am fired up by some inner image of a dream I want to make into a reality. That’s what got me into Skyrim modding in the first place, although at time, it was a lot more about the sexytimes options than it is now.

Now, I have more or less lost interest in sexytimes play. Been there, done that, not very exciting any more. Fantasies indulged, time to move on.

I have so little interest in that kind of thing that I am thinking about uninstalling all my sex related stuff in order to improve performance when I am out there actually playing the freaking game.

Burning out on that too. I pretty much only have one character after my current one left in me, and then it will bye bye Skyrim for a while.

And then I will have to go back to having to figure out what to do. Sad.

But first, I need to finish this blog entry  Then, a nap,. because for some reaon I am feeling amazingly sleepy right now, at 4:53.

It’s probably just my eyes getting tired. That can feel a lot like sleepiness, what with my eyelids getting heavy and all.

If so, I will be back on my feet and in front of the computer in half an hour or so.

Unless I fall asleep for reals, in which case, who knows? I will set an alarm for 6 pm because I need time to get ready for going out tonight.

But I might sleep through it.

I might just need sleep really bad.

I might need it really bad.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.