Moving in and out of focus
Riding a blurry line
Claiming that rules will choke us
Refusing to be defined

I guess this is who I am now
A cipher in God’s machine
Neither low or highbrow
Forever the in-between

In my head, those are lyrics to a 80’s synth-pop song in the style of Erasure or Depeche Mode. There will be a video just as soon as I learn how to turn the noises in my head into sounds in the world.

Actually learning to read and write music and thus become musically literate would probably help. I have been trying to do it without knowing that stuff and no matter what music is in my head when I start, I end up getting absorbed into the process and what ends up coming out is sort of an experiment in form and nothing like what I started out trying to bring into the world.

So yes. even in music I can’t stick to the topic.

Today’s been the same old same old same. Playing Skyrim, wasting my life, letting the days go by. Water flowing under.

There’s got to be more to life than consuming media and keeping myself distracted. The great thing about Skyrim, from the point of view of my mental illness, is that it gets me through time that would otherwise be a burden on me.

When my depression is bad, just the thought of all those hours of the day to fill fills me with dread and despair.

Like I sad, the main problem is : what the hell do I do with myself?

And I feel like that’s a question I will need outside help to answer. Someone to hold my hand as I venture into deeper waters. Someone to help build a bridge from where I am to what I want. Someone to talk me down out of my tree when I am freaking out and feeling fragile and abandoned and unfit for life.

Someone to please, please, please help me not to be so very, very alone inside. Someone who can pierce the ice around my heart and convince that scared little animal inside me that everything is going to be okay now, that we are safe and amongst loved ones who will protect us from harm.

I have been running scared inside my head for so long now.

It would be nice to be able to curl up and rest somewhere warm. and quiet and inviting.

But that unshakable core of panic is always there. It’s the trembling ground upon which I attempt to build something resembling sanity.

It’s the radioactive power core that powers my intellect and creativity and insight and general verbal overheatedness.

It’s the fire that burns within me that I hide from the world because I am so scared that I am going to burn someone or have it explode in my face in a way that will shame me for the rest of my days.

I mean, it might make me…. do something wrong!

From a systems point of view, that level of emotional repression in the service of not hurting people is a terrible waste of a very rich energy source.

Surely this energ can be harnessed and made to pull my sled forward without savaging any Iditaod spectators.

Lots of people have a fiery side and still make it in life. Instead of cutting this side off at the source, these people learn to tame it through experience, not repression.

They follow their emotions and the consequences shape their future actions.

i lock myself away from all real experiences, including the ones you are supposed to have as part of growing up.

In a way, I find it hard to imagine acting on impulse. Like how does that even work. Just letting the emotion you are experiencing at that moment dictate your actions.

To me, that is a bizarre way to live, and quite honestly it frightens me.

And sure, I “know” that life needs balance and there has to be some spontaneity and acting on impulse or we become dead inside as our impetus is destroyed by constant failure to achive a result.

There’s only so many times an impulse can be quashed before it dies.

Keep it up, and soon your soul is a graveyard of dead inspiration and you feel cold and empty inside because you have snuffed out your own pilot light.

Man,. me and my metaphors.

I really think the beginning of true recovery for a lot of us depressives begins with creating a space in which it is safe to act on impulse.

For me, I get that when I am noodling about on my synthesizer keyboard. No forethought goes into what I am playing. How could it? It all happens so fast. Too fast for sober reflection or any sort of logical consideration.

And it’s not being recorded so there can be no extrinsic motivation to come along and corce things to be serious and focused toiwards some “practicul” purpose.

That would take all the fun out of it.

True art is like fingerpainting. The only reward sought is pleasure for oneself in the here and now. The pleasure of exploring and experimenting to see what makes the biggest impact on us and then building from there.

In fact, I think part of what makes any artist great is their willingness to keep going, turning the stimulus up, and up, and up again, without flinching or stopping.

I call that “facing the fires of creation”, and it takes a very specific kind of person to do that. For most people, the intensity wpould be too high and they would stop and shrink back in fear.

But an artist of whatever form or media just keeps turning that knob up and in doing so, creates art with a loud, strong voice that can take pordinary people on a truly epic ride through art, taking people to places they could never go alone.

And what, pray tell, makes us artists capable of facing the fires of creation and coming away with something beautiful?

East. It’s because we’re all fucked up in the head.

It really is that simpke.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s lead the noun, not the verb. Still pretty depressed. Still po,laying video games (well, game, and you know which one) all the time vecause it’s the only coping mechanism I have at my disposal.

Everything I’m just doing something I enjjoy. All day. Every day. All the time when I am not writing, sleeping, or socializing with my friends is spent playing Skyrim.

And I suppose that, in a sense, it’s kind of astounding that one game has kept me occupied for this long. That’s unprecedented. And I don’t think it is the sort of thing that is ever going to happen again with any other video game.

Somehow, Skyim inspired an enormous nuimber of people to make their own stuff, and they are still making it today despite the fact that the game came out in 2011. The creative community Skyrim attracted is bigger than any other that I have ever heard of, and that means you have so much content out there that someone like me can keep playing for what has to be hundreds of hours now.

Plus, the game itself has chieved something very precious in its genre : there are millions of ways to play it. And those ways change the way you play the game.

I’ve told you about character builds before. I’ve gone through dozens. And each made the game new and fresh again because they make you play the game a new way, using different techniques and strategies.

For example, my current character is an archer. Has crossbow, will travel. His aim is deadly but he’s not got a lot of hit point  and he only uses light armor.

That means I can’t go charging into battle like I could when I was playing a big hulking slab of beef of an orc. And it means I can’t play the game offense-forward like I did when I was a fire chucking mage, where yoiu rely on your ability to kill things faster than they can get to your wimpy berobed self.

It also means I can’t play “alone”. It’s a solo game, so in that sense I’m always playing alone. But in the game’s universe, I need followers and/or pets to do the charging into battle for me so I can hang back and take my shots.

Other builds, solo was possible but not necessary. My thudding huge orc found the “hit bad thing hard with big sword” strategy worked most of the time. My fire wizard couldn’t go solo at first but eventually became so damned deadly that he could take on a dragon and not only not break a sweat but actually make me feel sort of sorry for the dragon.

But not really. Most of the dragons in the game are evil fucks who kill humans for fun.

For my next build, I am going to be… a witch!

Don’t feel obligated to watch the whole thing.

But while looking for that, I found this, and loved it so much I just have to share it.

And THAT, my friends, is why Bugs Bunny will always be the king for me. Because he does stuff like that.

Look hot in a dress, too.

So yeah, a witch. Or at least, a female mage who wearas all block clothing and can both fry your ass will spells or summon something to do it for her.

I recently downloaded and installed a mod called Apocalypse Spells that ads a ton of utterly insane spells to the game, but since then, I am not been playing spellcasters, so I haven’t had a chance to really dig into them.

The ones I have come across on scrolls are amazingly creative and well thought out while also very awesome.

This is the kind of insanity I need to be a part of.

Oh right, insanity. I was going to talk about being depressed. Although it should be noted that writing about my Skyrim exploits has made me feel a lot better.

Maybe I will start a seperate blog just for my Skyrimming. ^[1] I’m not sure who would read such a thing. Other Skyrim junkies, perhaps.

Anyhow. Depression. Right.

My days are now spent like I’m a respectable family with a crazy cousin they keep chained up in the basement and never acknowledge but they can hear their thumping and howling and cries of rage and pain.

But they all pretend it isn’t happening because it’s all they knew how to do.

And the whole time, the beast was growing stronger…

I figure that, sooner or later, I will no longer be able to ignore or suppress the voice in my head that is in a lot of pain and very depressed and filled with all of depression’s badness.  The wall between me and this voice will crumble and I will have some kind of breakthrough (or breakdown) and I will just have to deal with things then.

I wish it could be different. But I am hedged in by fear. The fear of throwing myself back into the existential hell of infinite possibilities without the will to choose among them so all I can do is cover my eyes and ears and ignore the infinite hallway with its infinite doors that are always all around me.

There’s so many things you could do, whispers a voice in my head. You’re such a loser for not doing any of them. 

But that’s wrong. I can’t do anything, not in my current state. Not while I am still paralyzed by this fear of the big bad world.

Not while I feel so goddamned unsafe.

And that’s not going to change until I do the right things.

Things I am too scared to do.

It’s a heck of a catch, that Catch-22.

I miss being healthier. Somewhere between VFS and now, I fell apart.

And now I forget what goes where.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I know twhat my problem is. Why I have been so depressed.

It’s because spending all day playing videos game just isn’t enough for me any more. I’m outgrowing it. Needs that I have smothered for decades are finally free to make themselves known, and they are doing so by the most convenient channel available to them, which is depression.

Thqat means the voice in my head that is mierable and angry while the rest of my mind is placidly placated by the mental stimulation and distraction of a video game.

This outgrowing is a very positive thing… in the long term.

In that short term, it means I have to confront the fundamental problem of my life, namely the question of what the hell I am supposed to do with my time.

And it scares me. It always has. I have spent my entire life hiding away from the world and consuming media.

If that’s not enough any more, then I am stumped.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and I can’t answer that basic question.

But it’s not a matter of IQ, it’s a matter of fear. The massive, nameless fear thay grips me when I contemplate expanding my safety zone.

This fear freezes me in place like the proverbial deer in the headlights. One that,. on one level, can’t wait for that car to hit it because at least then, it would be over.

I’ve realized that my lifestyle needs to grow, bbut I don’t know how to do it. I mean, of course, I can think of zillions of things I could do.

That’s not the problem. It never is. I’m a highly creative person. And very intelligent. I could come up with an endless number of the exact sorts of things people would advise me to do, and it wouldn’t make one fucking bit of difference.

Because none of it will happen. I’m still frozen in those headlights. It could be the most brilliant suggestion possible in this and all other universes and it wouldn’t mean a goddamned thing because whatever it is. I know I won’t do it.

I might act exactly like I am going to do it and even think I will do it while I am with the person who suggested it, but when they are gone the icy cold fog returns and I am once more isolated and alone and dying on the inside and I cope with it the only way I know how, which is to bury myself in media consumption.

Making most suggestions as to what I could do is as pointless as recommending that a legless man take a brisk walk.

The “doing things” part of my brain is broken.

Ergo, the entire question of “what to do” is based on the false assumption that I do things and it’s just a matter of picking something.

Nope. I died inside at a shockingly early age and thatplus all the bullying  made me fundamentally incapable of self-motivation.

Any urge I have to do things is instantly smothered to death by my intense and overwhelming need for safety.

Like I have said before in this space, the many traumas of my childhood destroyed my fundamental sense of safety. I never had that sense that I would be okay because my family was there to protect me and deal with the hard stuff. I never had my period of thinking the world was a safe and happy place.

When you’re raped at the age of three, that shit is gone forever.

And when you live with a constant fear of the world and all its horrors, the only real reaction to that, at least if you have a passive type personality like me, is to hide away from everything. To choose a defendable position and stay there no matter what.

And to quash any and all desires that would tempt one to leave their defensive position and thus expose themselves to enemy fire.

I swear, I am the mad wizard of metaphors.

When I even contemplate leaving my tiny comfort zone, I get this intense feeling of exposure, as if I am contemplating leaving my warm home to walk naked through a snowstorm just for the hell of it.

Suddenly, my comfort zone seems very warm and comfortable and safe, and the outer world seems cold and harsh and brutal, and it seems like utter madness to abandon my safe position in order to go out there where I could get hurt.

And sure, intellectually, I know that my fears are extremely irrational and unfounded and are, indeed, guaranteeing harm whereas expanding my life only risks it.

I guess it’s just a matter of what you’re used to.

But rationality is useless in cases like mine. Theses fears were installed in me when I was very young, and therefore are not accessible by the rational processes that I did not have at the time.

I mean, I was three or four when I got raped. I didn’t even have the majority of my adult brain mass yet.

So  whatever the solution is to my problems, thinking alone will not get me there. The answer lies outside the bright light of reason, somewhere in that inky black night where you can’t use your eyes to guide you… only your heart.

Problem is, I’ve never been comfortable “going with my gut”, even in circumstances where I really should. I attack the world with the overwhelming force of mny considerable intellect, and that’s great… amazing even… as far as it goes.

But what about the rest of me? The life support system for that massive intellect?

It’s that scared monkey with its hand on the controls of a machine that  is so powerful that it scares him too much for him to use said controls.

It’s the limp and vestigial body of a race of giant brains. Only without the telekineses.

It’s a freaked out little animal driven crazy by the pursuit of its predators so it never leaves its hiding place and, over time, slowly starves to death.

It’s an old man reading a thick book in a burning library.

It’s, on some level, the real me.

And it’s very, very sick.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fereling somewhat better today. I guess venting my pessimism and/or worries for the future yesterday did me a lot of good.

I am not, by nature, a pessimist. I consider pessimism to be a waste of time that only gets in the way of making things better.

The way I see it, both pessimism and optimism are logically unspoortable. They both assume that life has some kind of underlying, predictable nature that conforms to the highly subjective categories of “good” and “bad”.

And that’s utter nonsense. Where could such a unifying force come from? What would its enforcement mechansm be? What are the fundamental physics at work here?

The way I see it, both are merely subjective points of view. As such, they can be useful as a reflection of our mood, but to suppose ithat it goes any further than that is laughably arbitrary and subjective.

The very idea of being able to judge life in general based on the single data point of one’s own life makes no sense to me. Even judging one own’s life as good or bad is logically iffy. Most people have had times when their life seemed good to them, and other times when it seemed bad.

So what is the point of making a grand generalization about your life when you know damned well that you will feel differently later on?

So both optimism and pessimism are illogical and unsupportable. That does not mkake them equal, however, because the optimist, at least, is happy most of the time. Maybe they have unrealistic ideas about the world and maybe their optimism leads them unto error sometimes,. but at least they feel good.

Pessimism, on the other hand, leads to an unhappy person whose only pleasures in life come from the “I told you so” moments they crave in order to validate what they know is not a sensible logical position.

“Ha! See, life DOES suck and you WERE wrong to be happy when I am incapable of it and that makes me so much smarter, wiser, and tougher than you! .”

It’s pathetic, really.

The way I see it, if you have to pick one, you might as well pick the one that leads to the better outcomes. That is clearly optimism. Study after study shows that optmimistic people life longer, happier, healthier lives than sad sacks.

Ideally, one would reserve judgment entirely. That’s more or less my attitude. Whatever the nature of life (if it even has one), might be, I sill strive to make things better and to embrace the pragmatically optimistic view that we must always act as if things can get better because tha’s the only way things ever do get better.

No matter what your goals are, optimism will get you there faster than pessimism and make the trip a ;lot more fun too.

I understand where some pessmism comes from, though. The kind I call “reactive pessimism”. That is pessimism formed as a reaction to the excesses of the sort of optimism that causes people to ignore unpleasant truths and fall victim to easily avoidable disasters as a result.

On a case by case basis, this doesn’t lead to pessimism. But over time, it can make a person very bitter and misanthropic from the feeling that you are constantly rescuing idiots from theie own stupiditty.

(————————————————————————————————————-)

Time skip! I was having trouble thinking so I took a nap.

To sum up : Not a pessimist. That might surprise some people, given my depression. But it’s not the conflict it sounds like.

Actually, let me refine the statement : I’ve never been a pessimist in general. I am definitely a serial pessimist when it comes to myself personally.

That’s the depression part. And even that is slightly wrong because, to be honest, depression often keeps me from thinking about the future at all.

I’ve been pondering that barrier lately : the obe between “thoughts related to myself” and “thoughts relating to everything else”.

As befits my senselessly cerebral self, I am quite sane when it comes to matters impersonal. Excessively son, perhaps, at least according to some. The sort of people who find my hardcore clearheaded enlightened rationalism a tad unsettling.

And I get why. It can be harrowing to be around someone who… how do I put this without sounding like a raging egomaniac.

Fuck it. It can be harrowing to be around someone who sees through the illusions and nails the truth right between the eyes nonstop.

Socially speaking, it makes me quite weird.

It’s that whole “he who walks through walls” thing. I see through the social illusions that define the structure of reality for most people. And this gives me the autonomy to step in and out of their reality as I see fit.

The flipside,. though, is that I don’t see those social illusions very well,and so it’s hard for me to stay within them and “act normal”, no matter how badly I might want to in a given situation. This would not be a problem if I was some kind of radical individualistwilling to be exactly himself in all situations and damn theconsequences to myself or others.

But I’m not. Perhaps I should be. But I’m not, at least. not all the time.

Maybe  would be a happier man if, instead of half-assing my identity because on part of me wants to be fearlessly myself and another part doesn’t want to hurt people on any level for any reason,.

Maybe my attitude should be “I am me, unique and bizarre, and if people can’t handle that, to hell with them. ”

It might be impossible to go through life without hurting others. And some hurts are just plain not my responsibility even if I am the cause.

Maybe it’s just plain impossible to live a happy life if your identity is trapped in a tiny cage of overexaggerated empathy where everyone else’s emotions are more important than yours, to the point of never addressing your own needs.

Maybe I need to stop skulking in the shadows for safety and develop my own solid identity, and commit to it.

Maybe I need to grow the hell up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Y’all better back the fuck up because I’m gonna puke my pain onto the page and the first three rows WILL get wet.

Been pretty depressed lately. No source except possibly the change of seasons. No terrible event looming…. well, not in my personal life, anyhow.

The world itselgf is slowly sliding into an environmental apocalypse and we’re all watching it happen and not doing a damned thing about it, like we’re all tied to the tracks watching global warming steam towards us.

We all know it’s only going to get worse. And we know that with the idiots the pold people have put into power all around the world, the source will continue.

But eventually the problem will sort itself out.

When society has fallen apart to the point where nobody drives cars or runs power plants and factories any more.

So…. yay that.

And I guess that has been eating away at my mood. I have glimpsed a future where we finally went ahead and broke the goddamned planet amd the evidence of how badly we fucked up will be all around us at all times and we will have to live and die with the knowledge that bnothing short of nuclear war could have failed our kids’ generation harder or more thoroughly.

That horrifies me far, far more than whatever happens to me personally. I am sure my life will change a fair bit and I might have to become that hardcore angry bludgeoning bulldozer than I have been dodging for my whole life.

But I will survive somehow. I’m extremely intelligent, have many talents, and I’m fairly adaptable when I need to be.

I am sure gonna miss video games and the Internet, though. Who knows, maybe they will survive in some form.

But life will still be far more shitty, with extreme weather events becoming the norm and the average person’s life becoming more desperate and brutal.

It’s the food that really worries me. It would not take much of an unpheaval in the bread basket area of the world like California to send the prices of every day foodstuffs through the fuckin’ roof.

That would trigger inflation, maybe even hyperinflation.

And that’s just here, in the ridiculously decadent modern world. Here, we can survive there not being as much variety in our foodstuffs and people having to start really hardcore think about how to cover their basic nutritional needs with money that is shrinking in real value every day.

Might cure us of our junk food habit. But probably not. Not as long as junk food remains much cheaper than real food AND tastes better in an artificial hyper-stimulus kind of way we all know and love.

All those survivalists should really be investing in agriculture. The future will belond to the people who make food.

I hope democracy survives. It stands a good chance. The modern democracies of the world have all raised generations of citizens who expect to have a say in things and who really do not like being told what to do.

It might become an even more corporatist form of democracy, though. Depends on how the power dynamic battles go. Might end up with a world run by big agribusiness. Or we might end up with a real people’s revolution where people know who’s to blame for the hell life has become and want their fucking heads like in the French Revolution.

Certainly, people will no longer be content to sit on the sidelines saying “Well, if the politicians won’t do anything about it, I guess we’re fucked. ”

I predict a rise in eco-terrorism. There will be a lot of angry young people who are extremely aware of how badly they got screwed and want to strike back at the people they hold responsible for it.

Depending on how my own life goes,  I might be right there with them, gathering wood so we can burn these bastards at the stake.

Right now, in North America, we are in the dying days of people being able to ignore the problem as long as it isn’t having an effect on them in their lives and in their area.

Not too long from now, the craziness will be happening everywhere. Forest fires, hurricanes, tornados, pestilence and plagues, you name it.

It would be the days of the Black Death all over again. Maybe not in terms of loss of life – depends on whether we can defuse the next superbug viral bomb before it explodes or not – but in terms of things getting seriously fucking Biblical.

I suppose religiong of all kinds will see an upsurge of people looking for answers.

So yeah. Pretty sure the world I know and love will end within my lifetime and possibly within this decade.

That might be dragging me down a bit.

Like everyobne else, I’d been shoving that thought out of my mind because it is simply too big a thing to cope with. It’s too monstrous and horrifying and probable to think about. Much easier to hide in our hobbiexs and pretend it’s Business As Usual, full speed ahead, no problemo time.

Ironically, given all the doom and gloom I just portended, I actually feel a lot better now. It feels good to have finally let the truth in and spoken it aloud (so to speak). I think the denial was taking a heavy toll on me. I am not someone with a knack for protecting my hapiness from unwanted interference from reality.

So now that I have all that out of my system, I feel much better. That might even have been the root cause of my recent mood downturn.

The world seems like a brighter and happier place now that I have finally admitted to myself that we are all doomed.

Because gosh, team, what’s important is that we have each other.

Plus, when things get bad, there’s always sex cults.

And I want my own sex cult.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s roughly as gay as it gets.

All my life, I havbe been struggling day and night to stay sane despite the growling stomach of the ever-hungry maw of the mouth of madness. I have felt like I was going crazy so mayh times, and yet somehow I always managed to keep it together and not go full on looney tunes crazy.

But now I wonder why.

I mean, what’s the big deal? It’s not like holding on to my supposed sanity this way has led to wonderful outcomes for me. That pit of psychosis never gives up and goes away. The howling yawning chaos screaming through my soul like the voice of a thousand anguished demons never stops. I never find that warm safe cabin I long for as I wander the tundra naked and alone.

I just… maintain. And by maintaining, making sure nothing ever changes and progress is never truly made – merely simulated.

Does it really matter how brilliant or talented I am if a decade from now I am in the exact same position I have been in for my entire adult life? Still living a life devoted to the consumption (and to a lesser extent,. production) of media? A life where I bury myself in my distractions to the point where it makes my life qorse and that just makes me shut out reality even more?

There’s got to be more in this world for me than that.

But I have all this fear inside me that keeps me from reaching outside my tiny safety bubble to grasp at something more.

And this fear has no name. It is not fear of any particular thing. It’s more like I have all this junk inside me that gets in the way and stops me cold when I try to enlarge my comfort zone to possibly even include an actual job.

Or a boyfriend.

With a job.

When I try to imagine those things happening to me, I feel this icicle of fear stab me in the heart and I get the distinct feeling that something vital is clogged, pinched, broken, disconnected,. has a dirty connection, or leaks.

Because I can feel a part of me trying to come to life and make it back into the core personality but it shorts out or blows a fuse almost immediately.

It’s like a computer with too small a power supply.

And until I solve that issue, nothing is going to change. I will be the exact same person living the exact same futile life and occupying myself in the exact same way ten years or more from now.

If I should live so long.

I’m not a healthy person. I do a poor job of looking after myself,. probably because nobody was looking after me when I was little and so I had no real world people modeling the right behaviours and emotional reponse patterns for me

And a deep down part of me will always rthink that I am simply not worth the effort.

Fading out, will be back later.

(—————————————————————————————————————)

I have been using horizontal lines (per the HTML tag) for a long time now in order to denote a fast-forwarding of time. But I had a horrible realization recently.

You folks have not been seeing them. They show up fine in the editor I use to write these dang things but not in the finaly product, and that leaves these weird gaps in my blog entries, and that pisses me off.

So I have reverted to the typographical method of drawing said line. That ought to do the trick. If it doesn’t, I will have no choice but to declare conspiracy.

Speaking of which, I’ve been brooding over my loathing for what I call “conspiracy thinking” but shoiuld probably be called something like “using the tools of the conspiracy theory community as an excuse to suspend all rationality and intelligence because it’s so much easier to invent a conspiracy than to have to think about things.

I’m not saying this to bash the conspiracy theorist culture. I might not agree with a lot of what they say or how they think, but an awful lot of them arre very intelligent and thoughtful and creative. I feel like I have more in common with fringe people like that than I ever will have in common with the average person.

The people I am talking about are the climate change deniers and their ilk, like the anti-vaxxers or the anti-evolution crowd.

Deep down, they know their beliefs don’t stand up to even th4e most basic child-level kind of reasoning, and yet the ability to invent intricate  globe-spanning fictitious conspiracies in order to explain away all the flaws in their reasoning rather than actually addressing the problem has given shelter to many very bad ideas that shoould have been ruthlessly rooted out of the marketplace of ideas decades ago.

This supports a bewilderingly fertile and ever-blooming garden of rare and exotic hypocracies. The fact that a bunch of poor-bashing, immigrant-hating, compassion-lacking, military worshipping Americans can call themselves Christians boggles my mind. I have to wonder what the hell their religious leaders are telling them.

If I were a pastor (or the like) and I had that kind of a congregatioin, I would go gorilla poopy on them. I would tell them right to their faces that not only are they hnot Christian,. they are anti-christian. Antichrists. Satan’s butt buddies.

Seriously. I’d make Martin Luther look like Mister Rogers by camparison.

And the thing is, these people go to church and bible study classes and surround themselves with the iconography of Christ, and yet, do not burst into flame.

PErhbaps it is the deep down knowledge of their own unworthy souls that makes them cling to the external trappings of religion so hard.

It’s like they have hired the world’s loudest angelic choir in order to drown out the sound of their holy soul dying and Saran laughiung with glee.

Damn,  I should have been a preacher. I rock this kind of talk.

But there’s no such thing as an atheist preacher man (Iand now, Dawkins does not count). I could teach Christ’s message, poerhaps, but not the man’s divinity.

Pretty sure that would be a deal breaker with a lot of folks.

I will talk to yoiu nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I feel right now. Like I am in World War 2 era London, hunkered down in a bunker trying and failing to ignore the thuds and bangs and other horrible noises from above so I can finally get some sleep.

Except that I fucking hate sleep.

I thought I had done the smart and adult thing last night/this morning when I took my sleeping pillls at 5 am. My therapy appointment wasn’t until 1 p,m (or so I thought), and I don’t usually sleep more than five or six hours a night, so I figured I would have plenty of time to sleep, wake up, and be all woken up and ready by therapy time.

Bzzzzzzzt! Wrong. I was dead sleeepy all through therapy, despite having had around seven hours of sleep. I am only starting to wake up now and it is 3:18 pm.

And when I say I was sleepy in therapy, I mean I was barely coherent. I kept fading in and out of the conversation as my brain kept trying to make me sleep .I frelt like I was barely there. It was very stressful to fight the sleepiness.

But I bet my therapist has no idea I was in such distress. I hide mjy pain. It’s what you do when you were the baby that stopped crying.

This is no good,. I am still falling asleep. I will be back later.

Much later, as it turns out.

Well, I feel like I am on the opposite shore of that ocean of sleepiness now. I still feel pretty waterlogged but at least I am drying out in the sun.

Part of the problem is that now that it is getting serious about being fall, I’ve had to shut my windows and turn on the heat in my room.

And hisorically speaking, two things have always made me sleepy : poor ventilation, and radiant wamrth.

I’n getting both of those right now.

I first noticed the ventilation thing when I was a college stuident (the first time) and I had some classes in this classroom that was somewhat well known for making people sleepy because it was a basement classroom with no windows and hence subpar ventilation.

This turned courses I loved, like Psych 101 and The History of the English Language, into constant battles for consciousness. And both of those courses had significant video components, and thus required the lights to be turned down.

That made staying awake even harder. And we all had that problem. I just had it a little worse because I’m the sort of person who likes to sit directly in front of the professor so he can hear and see everything clearly.

And, to be honest. to reduce my social anxiety by letting me ignore most of my classmates. I don’t see them, they are all behind me,, I can be calm.

That’s quite sad, really.

Adn the radiant warmth thing I have experienced my whole life. I call it “the melt” because I associate it with coming home on a cold winter day and the heat of the house making me deliciously drowsy and needing a nap in which I would sleep quite well.

The only problem with that is when it happens when a nap is not an option. Like, for instance, when I had the seat right next to the radiator in Physics class in grade 11.

And guess what, it was the first class of the day.

So I would come in from a busy morning of walking to school and resenting having to walk to school on some bitterly cold day, sits in my assigned seat, and spend the next hour or so playing chicken with totally falling asleep in class.

To be honest, I was that at least one time I had just gone for it. Fallens asleep right in class. Just to see what would happen.

But my fear of falling behind the other students – which is quite potent – would never have let me do that.

The very thought that they are all learning something without me gives a panicky feeling like I am being left behind for good.

This is what happens when you are the youngest of four kids and people have a tendency to forget you.

Today’s been rough. Dealing with all that sleepiness was hard. Fighting to stay awake and stay focused is so goddamned stressful.

It would have been fine if this had happened on one of my lazy days where I have nothing in particular on in terms of socializing.

Saturday would be perfect because I don’t even have an episode to write. Or Friday, come to think of it,. for the same reason.

But no, it had to happen on a Thursday, the day of the week where I have therapy AND the Paragon meeting. It’s my busiest day of the week.

so I spent most of today either asleep or awake and trying not to falls asleep. In fact, I wasn’t sure I would even make tonight’s Paragon get together. Despite having slept most of the day, I was still so sleepy I was drifting of involuntarily as late as 6 pm.

I took one more 45 minute nap, and that seemed to do the trick. I was finally awake enough to go do stuff. I still felt like I needed to nap for a few months, but at least I was upright and conscious and more or less sentient.

All in all, I consider today to be a writeoff. Some days are like that. All you can do is write them off as one of those days and go on with your life.

When I finish this blog entry, I am going to take my clothes off, curls up in bed, turn out the light, and close my eyes for a while.Try to let the stresses and confusuion and and weariness of the day wash away in the outgoing tide and leave me fresh and new.

And when I open my eyes again,m it will be a new day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This song has been stuck in my head all day.

Specificaklly, the part at the end where the background singers are singing :

Everybody needs somebody
Everybody needs someone
Everybody needs somebody
You’re not the only one
You’re noit the only one

Well I might not be the only one.

But I’m the lonely one/

Despite my friends, both the in person kind and the over the Internet kind, I am still a very lonely man.

That doesn’t mean they have failed me or done anything wrong. It just means that I have the kind oif damage that can’t be reached by the usual sort of friendship. That sort of thing, wondrous and cherished as it is, only goes so deep.

And under that, I am a broken and lonely person roaming the endlress tundra of my frozaen soul, looking for sources of warmth but often too numb from the cold to feel anything more than the feeblest of warmth from them.

It’s taken me a while to realize this. I didn’t want to face it. And nut just because I felt it would seem like insulting ingratitude to those who care for me.

The truth is that realzing my own lonely nature meant facing to face a basic human need so massively unmet that to even contemplate it makes it seem like a vast black plane of broken ebony, hostile to life and colder than the depths of space.

And to touch it would be to die. It would swallow my feeble flame and the void would finally claim me. The darkness would finally finish the job of killing me and I would be no more. Like I’d never existed at all.

Cue my “It’s A Wonderful Life” sequence.

Oh look, it turns out everyone was a lot happier. that way.

This loneliness eats away at me constantly. It’s hard to truly encompass the sheer scope of it. It’s like I have been starving for my entire life without thinking about it, having shoved the hunger into a dark corner of my mind. And it’s only now, as I slowly emerge from the dank and dirty cave of my depression, that I realize how fucking hungry I am and how I honestly have no idea how to go about getting food.

As patient readers know, I missed most of the socialization one is supposed to get as a child. I was a lonely kid locked away in my lonely world of books, comics, TV, and video games. For long periods I had no friends whatsoever. I was at the bottom of the social totem pole – to the point where even the retarded kids made fun of me.

That really hurt.

And that whole time, instead of falling apart or crying out for help or in some way let the people who cared about me know that I was miserable, I just hid it all under a surface pleasantness and buoyancy that reassured the world that there was no problem, that everything was fine, and that noboby need to worry about me.

Not because that was true. It was, in fact, the polar opposite of the truth. But that was my role in life. To be the kid who’s easy to forget and ignore. The kid who never asks for anything. The kid who is happy with whatever he gets. The kid who always goes along with whatever is easiest for others.

The kkid more than willing to help you forget you ever had him.

My siblings do not – cannot – understand this. Because, as I have said before, you don’t remember ignoring something. Especially when that something is someone whom the entire family structurre treats as unimportant and without merit. Someone who seems complicit in their own utter lack of status.

Someone who is weird and sort of icky and who in no way will penalize your ignoring him, so you just do with what’s easiest, which is forgetting about him most of the time.

And when he does remind you of his existence, whether or not it’s his choice, you then react as if he’s annoying you just by existing because before he spoke up, he didn’t exist to you at all. And you convey that irritation with him via a clipped, angry tone of voice and the undertone of a constant weary put-upon sigh that underlies every word you speak. You make it abundantly clear that you are mad at him for reminding you that he exists and that you want to go back to forgetting all about him as soon as possible.

That’s what my childhood was like. So it’s no wonder I gave up on myself. Everyone else had. And that’s why I locked myself away from the world and retreated into the ice palance of the world of the mind and tried, as best I could, to stay there all the time.

A baby can only cry for so long before it realizes nobody is coming.

Then it stops. And despair sets in.

It’s only in this late phase of my life that I can look back and see how wrong it all was. And I don’t mean merely in a simple moral sense. It was wrong in a deeper sense of being the opposite of what should happen. It’s wrong in that it’s the sort of thing that is not supposed to happen.

It’s wrong like fish falling out of the sky is wrong. That’s not supposed to happen,. That’s not even supposed to be possible.

And yet, here I am, living the life that resulted from it.

And the wghole time, I pretended that everything was fine because it was clearly what people wanted me to say so they could go right back to forgetting all about me with the minimum of effort wasted on dealing with me.

And oit was clearly the only answer permitted. If I said anything else, people reacted with shock and irritation, like I had just appeared in a burst of flame and demanded their firstborn and a sack of gold.

That was not in the script. That was not allowed. They had not allocated any mental resources to dealing with any problem I might have and they damned well we’re going to change that now. Not for someone so absolutely devoid of merit, worth, or status.

After all, any resource spent on the worthless is a waste, right?

Books. Video games. Comics. TV.

It’s a miracle that I made it this far at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Recently, I stumbled into performing a bit of an experiment on myself.

The mechanism was simple : I stopped using my sleeping pills. First time was an acident – I just plain forgot. But  the result was fascinating enough to encourage me to keep it going.

First of all, my previous sleeping pattern almost immediately, and I can see how very strange it is now.

It’s a simple cycle : two hours awake, one asleep. Two hour bursts of activity followed by a one hour nap.

That’s the same ratio of wakeful hours to sleep hours as everyone else, of course. We spend a third of our lives asleep. It’s just that for most of us, that sleep comes in a single bundle of eight hours of sleep per night.

For me, it was more spread out.

And it’s an easy pattern to fall into when your computer room is also your bedroom and the bed is your computer desk. Add in depression and you have opened the door to a very strange lifestyle indeed.

It’s a lifestyle that can only exist when you are an isolated depressed loner, of course. Normal people have all kinds of things that make that kind of life impossible. Things like jobs and spouses and social commitments and all the other things of which I have no personal experience to draw upon.

But I’ve heard good things about them.

Anyhow, he said, violently jerking himself back to the point, I stopped taking the pills at night and my old pattern reasserted itself.

Not fully, thankfully. Trust me, it’s a bad place to be in, despite sounding kind of pleasant in a very lazy kind of way.

The big problem is that it traps you in the space between sleep and being awake. And you never truly wake up. That’s why it is so attractive to a depressive like me. The coziness of sleep never entirely fades away and in fact hangs around as an extra layer of warm numbness that protects me from the outside world.

But in the long term, it only makes things worse. There’s a reason why it was while living that lifestyle that I had the worst depression of my entire life and it’s because this half-asleep state suppresses your executive level brain functions, including the ones that keep your sanity together.

So I lost myself. The world felt increasingly unreal, and so did I. This terrible twilight I was living in was taking its toll on me and I was going along with it because it was easier than living.

Not better, in any way shape or form. Just easier.

Again, I drag myself back to the point.

This experiment of mine yielded the expecvt effect : the resumption of a previous sleeping pattern. Admittedly, I had forgottten exactly what that entailed, but I can’t say I was surprised to find myself back in that zone.

The surprising result was that I felt great.

For a while at least. Perhaps it was simple eupohoria from having to drag myself up out of the deep pit of apnic sleep any more. Perhaps it was my body’s ability to produce a natural stimulant when needed, and so I was kind of high on that. Perhaps it was the rare privilege of staying out of my own depths for a while.

Whatever it was, I felt pretty good. So good I was starting to contemplate discontinuing my use of my two sleep aids, Quietiapine and Trazodone, permanently.

Another interesting side effect : my sleep cycle became entirely nocturnal. Dawn made me sleepy and I did not wake up and perk up and feel ready to take on the world till it went down. It seems to be my natural sleep cycle.

I’m a creature of the night, apparently.

And looking back, I can see that there have been signs of this readily apparent in my life. I’ve mentioned how difficult I find afternoons to be in the space many times. Well that’s because the afternoon is actually my “middle of the night” and so it’s no wonder I am having difficulty staying awake during this time.

My body really wants to be asleep.

And it’s only the idea that I am “supposed” to be awake in the afternoons that has made me fight it for all those years. A social expectation of proper wakefulness timing has made me go to war with my own body.

I’d be far better off simply accepting it.

So now I have to contemplate an entirely nocturnal life. One where sunset is my dawn and supper is my breakfast. One where I am on a very different clock than others. One which is more or less the mirror image of how it’s “supposed” to be.

It seems doable. What socialization I get in life tend to happen in the early evenings, so I could do that without much trouble.

Especially now that we’re heading into winter and sunset is coming earlier each day. That’s always seemed like a depressing thing to me before now – the days getting shorter and nights longer.

But now I can see my way to downright enjoying it. After all, it will give me more hours of being awake and active. Just like summer is for non-vampires/

I am willing to give total nocturnality a try. It involves ignoring the voice of “supposed to” and the feeling that I am pulling further way from the rest of humanity, but the potential rewards make this gamble worth it.

It could improve my mood dramatically and vastly reduce the stress on both my body and my mind. And all it takes is accepting that I will sleep through the day.

Heck, if this goes well, I might not even need the sleeping pills any more.

Some things will still have to be done during the day,,,, after all, the rest of the world is day-active. Things like doctor’s appointments, meetings, and other dealing with other human being type things.

But I think I can puil this off.

And if I can, the results could be amazing.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.