HEARKEN UNTO THIS WARNING : Spoilers ahead! YE BE WARNED! 

Overall impression : Not bad.

Ths how seems to have at least some of the genuine Roddenberry spirit in that its Starfleet seeks peaceful exploration and stumbles into a situation in which that simple and innocent desire it put the the test in a very big and comnplicated way.

The tension built over the course of the episode until the cliffhanger ending, by which time I was, qyuite frankly, uncomfortable.

I’m gettingh old now and that level of tension is painful for me. I would much rather have things build more handleable levels of tension more slowly.

But that’s just my aged nerves talking.

I like the two female leads. Our main character, a chick named Michael, is first officer to an older Asian lady, and their student/mentor relationship comes across strongly without needing to be highlighted.

The main character is a human raised by Vulcans, which is really fucked up in my opinion. Perhaps because of my onw struggles between my Vulcan rationalism and the living breathing spirit it smothers, I can only see that situation as a recipe for disaster.

How can Vulcans possible see to her emotional  needs? How can any child withstand the constant punishment for normal emotional responses?

Hosw inhuman is it to let a human be raised by well intentioned non-humans who will not let her be… well, human?

We human beings do enough of that shit to one another. We hold ourselves amd/or others to utterly imossible standards of rationality and restraint and end up creating far worse demons of of mind whi lead us to far less logical activity than we we had just let ourselves be ourselves.

I’ve been pondering that today. Trying to find that self-forgiveness within myself so that I can drastically reduce the amount of senseless inner conflict within the area of my emotions and regain that energy and those reseaources for something more in keeping with a hale and hearty happiness.

I can feel the deadness inside me – the necrotic tissue of the soul – and it horrifies me. And that’s like the maximum amount of understandable. It’s hard to deal with the realization that you are dead inside in some pretty serious ways.

But it also gets in the way of healing the damage. Of pushing that dead tissue out of myself by whatever means necessary so that clean, healthy flesh can takes its place and my spritual kidneys can scrub the toxic leftovers from my toxic soul.

And so the cognitive capture continues. I catch myself in these negative thought patterns thaqt stem from the inability to accept my humanly imperfect self and stop trying to be some kind of secular Jesus of logic, reason, and compassion, and start just being a human being and making some kind of life for myself.

Just like my brother said I should do.

He’s a lot smarter than me in so many ways.

But the thing about cognitive capture and the rejection of the bad thoughts and insertion of the good thoughtds is that it is very, very tiring and involves this whole other kind of inner conflict that I feel. on some level, must be futile.

Or at least very very hard on my systems.

But at least it’s a way to fight back. A crude way, perhaps, but it’s better than nothing. It lets me feel like I am nope helpless before the massed might of me depression, but instead can reshape, reform, and recast my fractured mind by sheer force of will.

It is, of course, nowhere near that simple, but there’s renough truth to the idea that it makes me feel better.

It’s so hard to heal a broken mind when you have a broken mind. SOmetimes I get frightened by tghe sheer dpeth, breath, and vivid purplse-black horror of my illness. It tempts me unto despair.

But despair is pointless.

Sometimes I think of the process of recovery as being like having a good long healthy sweat in a sauna. The toxins get flushed out as the sweat evaporates the second it hits that hot dry air, and little by little, the body recovers.

I’ve never been able to do that, sadly, because the heat triggers my heatroke and I end up far sicker as a result.

Plus, saunas tend to be confined spaces with too little space inside, and that means my calustrophobia goes berserk as well.

There’s technically a sauna in this building, in fact. It’s tiny. Like, half a walk-in closet tiny. I get a low grade anxiety attack just thinking about going in.

Actually closing the door would be unthinkable.

So the closest I have gotten to the full sauna experience is sunning mysxelf on the beach. The sea breeze keeps my head from overheating and plenty of open space around me plus the ocean in front of me to help soothe my nerves.

And I am not moving around and thus overtaxing my fat guy cariovascular system. Instead, I am immobile, and can just lay there and enjoy having all those nasty toxins baked out of me by the heat coming up off the sand.

I’ve been feeling so stifled lately. I am worried that my sleep apnea might be getting worse. It’s completely untreated, after all, and it’s degenerative. Sometimes I find it hard to breathe even when I am awake.

The CO2 builds up in my lungs as I sleep, and being awake doesn’t clear it out all the way. So it builds up over time.

So obviously, I should go to my primary care physician and tell him I need help.

But then I would have to admit to him what a shitty patient I am, and that seems impossible to me. Too big. Too much.

So I guess I will just keep going until I keel over one day from lack of oxygen.

Yeah. That sounds like a plan.

Oh, and I guess the new Star Trek is okay.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Believe it or bnot, I can actually back tghat pretentious title up.

I have been thinking a lot lately (well, since this morning) about how anxiety feeds on itself and when you are an old pro at freaking out over shockingly little,. it all happens so smoothly that it takes real effort to remember that this slide from okay mood to the everyday mortal terror of the afflicated used to take time and have steps.

And each of those steps was its own escalation, which in turn was made of smaller escalation,, and so forth down into the twisting void.

Now LIke I have said before in this space. I am the “dysthymic” type of depressive, as opposed to the “anxious” type of depressive. That means that I exist in a constant state of low mood that sometimes detiorates deeper depression but not usually as quickly as the more anxious types leap into the stratosphere of mega-anxiety. The dysthymic depressive is tortoise to the anxious depressive’s hare. Most of us sad ones switch modes at times,. The diagnosis has more to do with overall trend than a description of any particular moment in the individual depressive’s life.

Hmmm. I have wandered into theorizing, pontificating, and lecturing again, I suspect. Better safe than sorry, anyhow. I am trying to learn how to tell when I am going away from the stuff I need to talk about and into the stuff I like to talk about.

I feel hoiunded by anxiety and aversion lately. Like I can’t go a minute without dealing with this enormous storm system of latent anxiety just ready to arc a lightning bolt of pure panic into my heart when all I am doing is sitting there trying to play a video game (three guesses as to which one, and they’re all Skyrim) without my emotional seismograph needle drawing something that looks likie the signature of a very angry person who doesn’t actually know how to write.

Trust me, it’s a complicated image, but worth it once you get there.

Now this latent anxiety is not exactly a total mystery to me. I think I am entering a phase in my life where a lot of the things burdening my CPU have been either handled or eliminated entirely, thus releasing more of my bodily energy for my personal use.

One little problem/. I don’t use it.

The release mechanism is still rusted shut for the most part. I haven’t covered the emotional geography necessary to truly unlock my inner resources and use them,m and so all this energy is building up with no way to be released.

Masturbation is of limited help. For one thing, it doesn’t always “work” ( I don’y “get there” and end up more frustrated than before.

And even when it does work, it doesn’t release nearly as much tension and energy as you would thinbk. I

I mean, it’s quite lovely and all, but its cathrsis value is far less than I would like.

In fact, I am beginning to suspect that I am reached the point where solo efforts just won’t cut it any more, and what a massive barrel of horny fish THAT opens.

I could probably arrange an assignation or two. Being a big fat dude lowers the odds but it’s a big city out there and there are bound to be people out there who would jump at the chance to tap my big fat ass.

That’s what I have been craving. It’s like I’m in heat. In October.

I suppose it’s too late for a TMI warning.

So I could probably get me some lovin if I could get through the massive social anxiety minefields involved. I’m not used to letting people into my life.

Let alone my… favours.

And the nature of a hookup would help because I would have a “role”, of sorts. We would both know why we were there and there would be a minimum amount of time in the hellish void of social uncertainty.

In fact, with how I have been feeling lately, I would want to “get right to it”.

Is it weird how I can be so explicit and so cerebral at the same time? Whatever.

And this libido crescendo is, overall, a good sign. It means I am connecting with life on a bolder and more intimate away. Another layer has been removed from my emotional suppression apparatus and another form of normal human emotion has come online.

I will be a real little boy one of these days, by gum! (Mental note : Buy gum. )

I have honestly never experience a sexual appetite like this. I think I might be finally getting around to emotional puberty. I am pretty sure this is the sort of hot hormonal insanity that I have heard so much about from TV.

I never experienced that at the appropriate time. Sure, I was horny as a teen, but I never felt like I would go crazy if I didn’t get to fuck.

I kind of feel that way now. It’s…. interesting.

So who knows, this might be what finally drives me to put up that craigslist ad advertising my deep need for cock and seeing if anyone wants to provide some for me in the local area.

I might even consider a paid “escort”. What the hell, I got money. And the nature of the financial transaction sure would cut through a lot of small talk.

But the Scot in me would have trouble paying for something he might have been able to get for free.

So we’ll see.

Odds are nothing will come of or from this. Those fears of mine are still pretty tough. Inviting a stranger into my bed is a pretty big challenge.

But damn it, I want to start enjoying the unlimited sexual license that is my birthright as a homosexual man,. I want cock, damn it!

I’m just too ,much of a pussy to get it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was going to do a second attempt at typing the worlds in as fast as my mind creates them as an experiment today, but I don;t have the energy.

Mental note : should probably do this kind of thing AFTER I have eaten.

Feeling sort of oblong and out of season today. I’ve poked somje life into my Skyrim playing by downloading a few key thing, but the game is still in a death spiral in my estimation, and when it crashes, I am going to need a new game.

Otherwise, I will be in serious danger of producing productive labour. Ha ha ha.

Seriously though, I have enjoyed this vacation from having to figure out what to do with my comious free time. SPending nearly all of said time playing a video gqame might not strikle the casual observer as a healthy response, but everything else involves having to get out there and deal with the world, and I am not inclined.

But seriously folks.

My gig doing Uno scripts is going the way of Skyrim too. I find myself more and more reluctant to do the work and I am finding it harder and harder to get through that painful initial phase where the initial news story has to be carved into pieces that can be turned into jokes. I keep getting the urge to go wildly off topic and write an ep that is just random and weird and goofy.

Or do the quivalent of a film school project with one ep. Moody lighting, overlapping dialogue, dramatic lighting of just people’s eyes. Could be fun.

Or if I really want to burn all my bridge from now till the end of time plus five minutes, write something so incredibly and vividly pornographic it would makle Ralph Bakshi blush and cause Larry Flynt to become a passionate advocate of comprehensive censorship for everything everywhere.

And you know I could do it. I’m a dynamically perverted man with mad verbal skills and a strong desire to give the masses something they can’t handle while also creating a haven for all us pervs where they can ask for and get what they really want, without judgment or shame but with love in all its wonderful forms.

That turned out fancy.

And I would, of course, love writing it. And not just in the “what is the sound of one hand typing” kind of way. To me, the sexual liberation for the human race is a spiritual mission. I honestly believe that an unashamed and horny world would have far less war, hate, ugliness, and evil.

I imagine a world where sex is open and free. Seeing people fucking in public would be as common and as frowned upon as making out ihn public is to us today.

In other words, it would be something that you shpouldn’t do and people would tsk and maybe even complain, but it would not be that big a deal and most people would choose to simply ignore it.

Obviously, then, this would be a world where sex is no mystery to kids. It’s a fact of life like needing to eat or wanting a hug or being happy to see a loved one. It would be seen as a “soft neeed”, in that you do not literally need sex in order to survive like with oxygen or water.

But A real need nonetheless.

It would also be a bisexual-ish world. Most people would have a preference but would be open to sex with both genders, at least in theory .There would be no need for this ridiculous idea that you have to “choose”.

Bullshit you do! Love who makes you happy. Fuck what makes you horny. The only rule is consent. Other than that… have at it!

I’m not idealistic enough to claim that this kind of revolution would lead to a utopia filled with nothing but love and peace and stain resistant public seating. There’s no such place as Utopia, not because hope is for fools and life sucks but because humanity is restless, curious, and bold, and will always find the next problem to solve.

Back to my post-revolution happpy humpy funland. There would bhe places you can go for specific kinds of sex just like there are pla ces you can go for different kinds of food in the world we live in now. It would not even be thought of as prostitution, and a lot of the time, it wouldn’t be, because there’s nothing to keep the customers with shared interests hooking up with one another.

The business model would. presumably, be entry fee or membership based.

Just like gay bath houses, come to think of it. If they had those for straight people (somehow), there would be no more war.

Anothjer aspect to this wondrous fucktastic future of mine is that there would be a mostly unspoken backbground attitude of “try to say yes”. Not if the sex act someone proposes is repugnant to you or in any way will leave you worse off after.

Just a general sensze that the world is a better place when we all help each other out, and that means that polite people would try to accomodate others. Sort of like being a good Samaritan, but with sex parts.

“Exuse me, but may I suck on your penis until you ejaculate in my mouth?”
“Hmnmmm…. bust won’t get here for ten minutes, so…. sure.”:

I know this fucktastic future of mine would absolutely horrify most people . Simply letting kids see sex happen would be enough to make people want to club me to death. I am, to put it mildly, way ahead of my time.

But I honestly believe that this is the future we are headed towards in the far far future. Every generation peels back another layer of bullshit shame and completely unnecessary sexual weirdness, and eventually. we will have gotten rid of all of it and a whole lot of problems will have just kind of… taken care of themselves when everyone is finally sexually satisfied.

I won’t live long enough to see it.

But I can see the seeds of it in today’s young people.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight’s blog entry is going to be an experiment. I want to see what happens when I write as fast as I can without stopping to think or anything.

I’ve done this experiment before, but that was way before I started developing myself as a writer was back in 2011. So I am kind of curiousa as to what will happen now.

So get ready for an entry even more meandering, disjointed, and bizarre than usual!

Let the experiment….. BEGIN!

Well there frst thing to do, obviously, is to start anywhere at all. No trying to find the “right” opener. That’s like trying to plan being sponteneous. It just doesn’t work.

Part of the point of this whole thing is to encourage myself to be more spontaneous in my life and my writing. I have talked in this space about how all my imkpulses have to pass a strict border check that lets very few of them through, much to my detriment.

To act without needed to think it through on any level – going purely by gut – would be a powewrful act of rebellion for me. It would signify a level of trust in the world that I have never had except possibly when I was a prechooler.

But once the school damage set in, I turns into a person who treated life as a chess game, with every move carefully considered and weighed and considered from all possible angles. Underlying it all is a vast mistrust of the universe and a deep conviction that the only way to be safe is to stay one step ahead of life by thinking ev everything out and checking for potential disasters and controlling the fuck out of outcomes and in general never, ever, ever doing anything out of pure emotion.

That’s no way to loive, as I like to say. For one thing,. lifer requires a lot of decisions and you often simply do not have the time to think them through. It’s go with your gut  or nothing. And nothing is not an option.

Another thing wrong with that approach was pointed out to me by my therapist recently – oit’s a hell of a lot of work. The mind has to work pretty hard, in an absolute sense, to do all that processing and predicting and pruning.

It’s the sort of solution that only a highly intelligent brain would even be able to contemplate let alone implement, and the fact that when my therapist brought this up to me, all I could do was ;lamely say something about how I am used to it speaks volumes about how messed up my mental situation really is and points to the nature of the problem on a concrete level.

It’s one of computational overhead. And it’sa tricky one. I’ve spoken before about freeing up my mindspace by ridding myself of all those unexpressed emotions.

That can be looked as an a ct of freeing up mental CPU cycles. And those CPU cycles can be used to support mood.

Turns out, being happy takes a certain amount of processing. The average person’s minds does a lot of calculation as it figures out how to balance the individual’s mood dynamically at all times.

We depressives lack that balancing function. So our moods are unstable and unpredictable. In response, we develop external balancing mechanisms which vary in form but which all have the common trait of activating the reward center of the brain whether the addiction in question is physical, chemical, sexual, emotional, or even spritual in nature.

These balancing mechanisms are very crude and have nowhere near the kind of efficiency that a healthy individual’s long developed and refine self-balancing instincts can provide. It’s like the difference between catching a ball in your hand and catching a ball in mittens, blindfolded, and the ball is on fire.

It’s like healthy people have thius force that pushes back against negative emotions, and people with depression don’t. A healthy person’s mind received a negative input that initially pushes the mood deep into the red, but then this other mechanism pushes back until the final result as a mood that is a little worfse than before, but not anythimng like the deep and horrible abyss that a depressed person’s mind would go to.
When the negative input is received, it pushes the mood downward without resistance. No wonder it craters so hard.

So we now have to ask ourselves what this balancing mechanism is. how does it work, how to fix it, and how did it get broken in the first place.

The simpel answer would be “trauma”, but that hardly adds any information to the debate. Presumably it involves trauma that is beyond the human mind’s ability to heal and which therefore persists and acts as a wound on the the psyche which causes long term problems of its own.

What I really want to know, though, is what IS psychological trauma on a biological basis. It seems odd to me that thois sort of thing can happen – that the human mind is vulnerable to a form of injury that has absolutely nothing to do with physical trauma whatsoever. Mere input can destroy parts of the system.

It’s something we all understand on the everyday level – bad things happening to people hurts them,. Tjat’s obvious to pretty much everybody.

But wbhen I try to imagine what is happening in the brain, I draw a blank. Presumably it’s something deeply biochemical and therefore opaque to someone like me who larned absolutely no biochemistry in school.

But still…. what the hell is happening in there? And is it possible to prevent it or at least immediately treat it with a form of mental first aid.

And is there a way to train the human mind to better respond to this trauma? Could we raise a generation of child who are far more psychologically robust than us? Could mental illness become a thing of the past this way? Dare we find out?

Well that’s my words for tonight. Did not turn out much different than a regular bog entry, did it? Well I fugred out a lot of the observatiobns above as I was writing them, and so I ghave profited from this idea that way.,

But if I do it again, I will clear my immediate environs of  distracting displace substances like food and drink. I ate supper while I wrote this, and I think the pauses to take a bite or a sip gavem me too much time to think about what comes next.

Next timne., I will put the pedal to the metal and see where I end up!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s Therapy Thursday today.

Me and my therapist got talking about my Energizer Bunny way of just keeping going no matter what, and how bad that is for me in the long term.

The enelogy I used was that I likened it to one of those people who drivers the same piece of shit car for twenty years, pouring thousands of dollars into it and becoming a laughingstock for the whole town because they drive this disaster of an automobile,. and seem oddly prouid of their “loyalty” to it.

And all because they have a little trouble letting go of things.

I’m like that car. No mattter what, I keep going at my extremely low level. Rain or shine, come what may, I slog ever onwards.

But the thing that I am quite ill, and I have a lot of psychological issues, and there are times when you actually should flame out and fail because that’s the only way the bad system can die and make way for a new you to emerge.

The role of destruction in change is something I have struggled with. Logically, it’s a slam dunk. but part of me always wants to believe that there is another way.

The fact that in moves and on TV, the only peopole you hear talking about destruction and renewal are supervillains looking to kill everyone on Earth doesn’t help either.

Myh entire persoanlity (and that of any Taurus) is geared towards preserving and maintaining , and accumulating value.

That doesn’t leave much room for destruction and renewal. That’s more of a Scorpio thing. We are the sign of not being able to let go. They are the sign of not being able to keep things. It’s balanced.

So I just plain keep going when I should at least be pulling in for a pit stop now and then. But that would involve stopping and I can’t stop for any reason.

If I do. something terrible will happen. It’s the same overwhelming dread that I feel when I contemplate doing something other than what I had intended on doing.

My guess is that it’s the universal emotion of compulsion denial and that what I feel is a lot like what people with OCD feel when they try to resist one of their compulsions.

It doesn’t matter how blatently and obvious irrational it is. It obviously causes me no great hard to have to change the plan in my head. It’s just as obvious that nothing bad will happen if an OCD sufferer doesn’t touch the doorknob exdactly three times when they leave a room.

But the forces involved are way stronger than reason and operate on a level far deeper than our consciousness, and it’s very hard to resist it as a result.

I have veered way off topic again. Sorry. Mygh therapist has noticed this tendency in me too. He said he could warn me when I am doing it – when I start off talking about myself then slip into theorizing and extrapolating and pontificating as I am wont to do, and do it so smoothly that I don’t even know I am doing it.

I will strive to fix that in the future. The first step is becoming aware.

Where was I? Oh right, keeping going.

Time break! Ironically, after writing that last senetence about keeping going, I failed to keep going (I needed sleep) and it’s now much later in the day.

And with the time shift comes a topic shift, because now I want to talk about my argumentative nature and how it still gets me in trouble.

I ended up arguing with Felicity tonight and she made the very excellent point that it feels like I am attacking her when I argue with her negative self-comments because of the way I go about it.

Wwhen I hear someone I love saying bad things which are untrue about themselves, I (over) react in my typical fashion and rise to their defense. The same thing happnes when I hear them expressing a way of thinking I think they need to escape.

I leap into action as Counter Argument Man and my missions is to destroy the evil thoughts and ideas before they can hurt my loved one any further!

OR at least, that’s the idea. But those evil thoughts and ideas are part of the person I am trying to protect and from their point of view, its hard for them to tell the difference between me attack the pernicious thoughts and me attacking them.

So my big ol heart is in the right place, but my pugilistic nature and my overperforming urge toi defend people I love get crosswired and I end up doing morw harm than good when I so desperately want to help.

This is, of course. unacceptable.

So now I have a lot to think about. I feel like I have to invent an entirely new mode for my personality. Or rather, a synthesis of other modes. Be a gentle listener, and ask the sort of questions that keep the person talking. Attack nothing, no matter how loud my entire endrocrime and nervous systems are crying out for me to leap into the fray and destroy the threat.

What matters are the results. As a hardcore pragmatist, that’s a truth I cannot dodge.

So I will have to work on modifying my response so that it matches my intention.

And that will take a long time and a lot of difficult thinking. That’s always the case when you realize that your natural response just won’t cut it any more and that means you want to change your natural response, in a sense.

In the right context, my instantly leaping to the defense of a loved one would be seen as heroic. But there is no kind of action that is the right thing to do in every situation.

Gotta put that bear back in his cage and finds a new animal for my act.

Something a rad calmer/.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Caveat : It’s a rhetorical question,. Please do not answer it.

That said, lately I have been wondering what exactly mky major malfunction is. The eay answer would be “depression” but that is a functionally meaningless label at this point in my life. Yeah, I’m depressed…. and…?

It was very important when I was first diagnosed and put on Paxil. Before that, I was only vaguely aware that there was a mental disorder known as depression and that some people suffered from it. but if I had thought about it at all, I would have been imagning people on ledges with cops trying to talk them down, or people in mental hospitals who aren’t allowed near anything jagged.

I certainly wouldn’t have thought of it applyinjg to myself.

But that’s how my particular flavour of depression operates. It hides itself under distractions and diversions and a superficially bright and cheerful mood while on the inside, I am in terrible pain and falling apart.

The problem is. I rely on that game of pretend to be happy to make me happy. Fake it till you make it, I guess. When I have an audience, I can escape from myself and pretend to be the person I want to be.

So to me, it’s not entirely fake, or entirely real. Instead, this persona I project exists in the grey area between real and fake, and I’m very comfortable there.

Reality is too much of a commitment. Fantasy is too ethereal. Things that are in between are perfect for those of us who like to have our options open so that we always have more than one escape rouite.

Otherwise, we feel trapped. Even when we are perfectly safe. Because we’re crazy.

All part of the deep down inability to feel totally safe that comes from early childhood trauma. The world has always seemed hostile and dangerous to me. I’ve always thought that my only defense was my ability to anticipate and control events. I’ve always considered my brain to be the only weapon I had against a cruel and rejecting world that had no place for me in it.

And that’s no way to live. It’s bad for any mammal to have that kind of permanent, long term stress. Physically, stress damages people because it causes our bodies to act like it’s an emergency and to make decisions as though it’s in a fight for survival.

That’s mpore or less the recipe for poor long term decisions. The stressed state is not meant to last. IT’s meant to save you when the saber toothed tiger is about to eat you. Then it’s supposed to go away.

Psychologically (and neurologically), the situation is even worse, because a haunted mind like my own never truly rests. And that makes the psyche inherently unstable because it can never fully shut down for maitenance and repair.

Not even when I am asleep.

So that’s one thinjg that’s wrong with me. Another, and this one is key, is that I do my best to keep from being alone with my thoughts.

That mind sounds odd coming from a thoughtful person like me, but that thoughtfulness is just one of the ways I keep myself distracted.

When there is no other option, I think about stuff. This began when I was a hyper bored bright kid who spent most of classtim, shall we say, unengaged. Listening to the teacher took only a tiny bit of my massive mental bandwidth, and when we switched to doing the classwork, that wouild divert me for a very short time as those mental muscles of mine made short work of this stuff that was far, far beneath my abilities.

That’s one thing. But for some insane reason, I was not allowed to read when I had completed my classwork. Can you believe that? Telling a kid NOT to read?

What harm would there have been if I had read quietly while the other kids did their work? I was perfectly willing to be a happy little bookworm and fade into the woodwork while I escaped into a book, But no, it was important that I sat there with nothing to do, bored out of my gourd, as punishment for being too smart and making the other kids feel bad. I guess.

Anyhow, my response to that situation was to travel inwards, so to speak. To disppear into the world inside my skull and think long and hard about things, mostly on a subconcious level. It was like a rather cerebral form of meditation, and it made the time pass a lot faster.

Remember that, because making the time go faster has been my pattern for my whole life. That’s a big part of why I am addicted to Skyrim.

When I am playing it, the hours go by withoiut friction or fear. It solves the problem of what the hell do I do with myself so well that it’s become the default thing I do.

And why wouldn’t it be? When I am playing, I am more or less happy.

That reminds me of another issue : being kind of dead inside. By that, I mean that I go long periods without amy real motivation or awareness of my situation or curioisity about what life is like outside my cage.

I am not a lively, healthy animal. I’m lethargic, incurious, and passive.

And I know this is not right. I can feel the wrongness of it all. I want to be a more lively, vital, engaged person,

But I am too addicted to that inner anesthetic that is depression to be able to reach my life-spring on a regular basis.

It’s just so much easier to stay asleep and let the days go by. I’ve been out of VFS for five months now, and I have done very little with my education and qualifications from there. The one really good opportunity I had was with Secret Informant, and I let that die on the vine, and since them I have been sliding deeper into the abyss.

And some days I have the energy and the wherewithal to pulls myself further out.

But on others, it feels too damned good to just…. let go, and let gravity take over.

And then I have to find the nerve to start the climb again.

And that takes a very long time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lately, I have been feeling like I am going down, down, down. No end in sight. No changes of speed. No thought of stopping the process. Just the feeling of a slow, calm, and easy death,.

The problem is, I’m enjoying it.

Dunno what that means, but it can’t be good. It’s like a slow and stately suicide where all I hve to do is sit back and relax and enjoy the show. And it comes with a rather sick sense of relief, as though part of me is saying, “I’m sure glad THAT is over and done with. “

“That”, of course, being my life.

A quick reminder : this is all metaphorical, I don’t think I am literally dying.

That said : death is the ultimate, final escape for us escapists. The last word in running away from our problems instead of facing them. The definitive way to remain untouched.

I’ve thought a lot about remaining untouched lately. Of going to where they can’t get to you. Of always dancing out of the way of their touch and remaining pure unto yourself.

It’s not a very good life strategy.

I wish I could explain what I mean by “untouched” in this context. Part of it is empathy based – being able to avoid the mental touch of others which can seem very invasive to those of us who experience the feelings of others very keenly, and who don’t necessarily have the strongest sense of our own identity as a result.

There’s always been a lot of people in my head, only one of which was me.

And this has its benefits. It gives me deep insight into the deep emotional lives of others. Every person I interact with leaves an impression behind and on a deep level, I process that impression and turn it into an understanding of that person and where they are coming from.

It all gets added to my deep model of humanity, which I can consult freely. This then informs my humanitarian impulses because the more you know about people, the harder it is to hate them because you understand their struggles and know that they are just as much of a bewildered monkey as you are, no matter how they may seem within the confines of social reality.

And once more, I have wandered away from myself and into cerebral pontification.

If only there was a WordPress plugin to detect THAT.

I will drag myself back to the point now.

When you have my kind of empathy, it can be hard to get some alone time, so to speak. I think this fuels my tendency to isolate myself. I can only truly calm down if I am completely alone both inside and outside my overstrained cerebrum. What company I do get tends to be via the moderating medium of the Internet, which vastly reduces the amount of psychosocial stimulation I get from people

.
Plus, I pretend to be an anthropomorphic fox. That helps too.

Anything to take me away from myself. That’s a form of escapism too. I hate being me and which I could be someone else. Things which occupy my mind fully let me forget that, and that’s a big part of what makes me so addicted to video games.
I get to be someone other than myself there too.

And this deep and primal self-loathing is not based on any particular fact or memory. It’s deeper than that. Like a lot of survivors of child sexual abuse, I carry with me a profound sense of disgust for myself and view myself as a disgusting, dirty, violated thing that reeks of corruption and unworthiness.

We end up feeling tainted and toxic, even though we are the victims and it’s our assailants who should feel totally worthless, not us.

But if someone dumps a bucket of shit on your head, it doesn’t matter that it is their fault and not yours. You still feel dirty and disgusting.

And my incident happened when I was a preschooler, so its effects went very deep. I think that might be why I got so good at concealing who I really am. So good that I can even fool myself sometimes.

And it’s why I have a deep down terror of people really getting to know me. If they did, they would see what a horrible shit-monster I am and they would run away forever.
It’s much safer to present the world with an illusion. One I can control. And like any good liar, I keep my illusion as close to the truth as possible so I attract the minimum amount of suspicion.

I could be wrong. Maybe it’s the projection that is the real me and the filthy and unworthy scared little critter inside me that is the illusion. I know I have done nothing to deserve this feeling of profound toxicity and the painful self-rejection that it engenders.
Nobody can be healthy with that level of self-hate. No wonder I don’t like being myself.

Or maybe that filthy little beast is the real me, but all it needs is someone to patiently and carefully and gently clean it up, and give it a hug, and tell it that it’s a good little beastie and that the dirt was never truly part of it and that it is loved and accepted and wonderful.

I’d like to be that person for myself. The ultimate pet groomer. The kindly kindergarten teacher I never had. The adult willing to take me on despite my troubles that I never found. The gentle but firm parent I needed so badly to give me both comfort and guidance.

But I don’t know if I can do it. I know that I will need to tackle that sense of being inherently horrible in order to do so. Otherwise I will not be able to generate the energy to do it. The deep conflict of self-rejection takes up too much energy for that.

It’s like I have a swamp inside me that needs draining,

And I’ve lost the keys to the pump.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s starting to get to me.

I spent the vast majority of my last 24 hours playying Skyrim. That is what my life is now. Skyrim is my default mode. When I am not writing, sleeping, or socializing with my freinds, I am playing Skyrim.

And that covers an awful lot of hours.

It’s not that I am not enjoying myself. If it was that simple, I would simply quit playing it and go find a better game.

No, the problem is that as I am happily engrossed in the ham, there’s a restless and dicontented voices screaming in an airless closet somewhere in my soul.

It’s both a very fun way to spend time and a kind oif addiction, and I don’t feel like I am fully in control of my life.

I’m way better off than when I felt into the deep dark hole at the beginning of my experience with Skyrm Remember that? When I stopped doing almost anything else but playing and tinkering with Skyrim/.

And that including some surprisingly optional things like eating, sleeping, drinking water, showering, and putting on pants.

IAnd I have to wonder what put me in such a sensitive and vulnerable state to begin with. What made this game different than all the others I have enjoyed but did not feel compelled to play for 12 hours plus a day.

It’s gotten so bad that I have to constantly remind mysef that my life is not supposed to be about maximizing my Skyrim time.  That’s what I have been doing,. I am a natural born optimizer and that coupled with this hole I am still digging myself out of makes for a very unhealthy kind of efficiency exercise.

But the thing is, while I am playing, I am happy. Or at the very least, not unhappy. The game keeps me mentally occupied, stimulated, and entertained with surprising reliability. As long as I am doing my Skyrim thing,  the hours slide by effortlessly and I am getting through life wuith a minimum of friction and pain, and I am not anxious, depressed, scared, sad, confused, or in pain.

It’s the perfect drug.

At the samne time, there is a growing discontent that gnaws at me from the inside and makes me feel like I am going yo explode. Playing the game suppresses the voice but by no means kills it. So while the vast majority of my concscious mind is busy and happy and engrossed, a sma;ll but very potent part of my psyche is in terrible pain and wants to stop and do anything else.

PReferably something involving a lot of physical activity so I could reduce my stress and bodily tensionlevels.

But my depression weighs me down and makes me stay there in that seat, playing that game. because it doesn’t want to go back to having to figure out  what to do with all my free time and energy.

So I hide in the game while my life passes me by.

I’m not sure what makes Skyrim all that different from the hndreds of other video games I have played, There’s tons of very good games that did not have this effect on me. Games that I loved to pieces but nevertheless would only play for a couple of hours, get tired of it, and quit to take a nap or read for a while or switch to my other mode, which was doing stuff on the Web while chatting with the fuzzies.

Nothng has sucked up my free time like Skyrim does.

Partly it’s the game itself. Theamount of content in it is staggering. I have played for hundreds of hours and I am still finding new stuff that I had no idea existed.

Also, there’s so many ways to play. I have mentioned builds before. You can play is a ninja. Or a big beefy warrior. Or a sly and powerful mage. Or a dark and treachorous necromancer. Or a cunning archer who strikes from the shadows. The possibilities are endless, and which each incarnation, even the very familiar quests becomne fresh and new. as you solve the same prob;lems via different abilities.

For example, my current character is a necromancer. By myself, he is not all that strong. He has good combat magic but that is it. If I were to charge into battle like I did (and enjoyed) when I was a big beefy Orc, I would be slaughtered.

Instead. I summon dead’y and powerful creature and let THEM do the fighting while I stay on the sidelines lobbing the occasional spell into the fray.

Well, at least that’s the idea. SOmetimes I have to lob spells at the things which is trying to eat me and ergo it’s a very short lob.

Plus there’s the massive amount of free content for Skyrim.

But I also think that it came along at a point in my life when I was particularly vulnerable. I had lost all the forward momentum I has after graduation and I was adrift. A big void had opened up in my life, and this amazing game was there to fill it.

And now, I have experimented. successfully, with refusing to judge myself for my current polarized lifestyle. I’m spending my time doing something I enjoy. I spend my days mostly happy. So what’s wrong with that?

But I have moved past that now and I am left with this feeling that I want more. That I am increasingly discontent with how my life is going but too scared of the xistential void of infinite possibilities to acknowledge and act upon this disconent.

The discontent grows, though, and eventuially it will overwhelm the fear and spur me into action. I can hasten his by doing what I can to act on my impulses more often and rearrange my life around my desires, not my limitations.

I am a grand and powerful person and I deserve a chance to flourish and bloom in the full and wholesome light of day.

I just have a lot of fertilizer to get through first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hell if I know.

That’s the thing… when you suppress almost every impulse for a long enough time, you get so far out of touch with your emotions that you don’t even Like each other’s Facebook posts any more.

Not even the one with the baby hugging the puppy at Burning Man!

But I am certain that the answer to that key question will open a lot of doors in me, and so I dig diligently like I am looking for gold or treasure.

And I am. In the form of sanity.

Thje hot and cold sides of my personality have to meet mingle, and unite. My goal is always integration in all things. I am a uniter, not a divider. I want everything to function as one gloriously efficient and healthy whole, without any more suffering that absolutely necessary, everyone in the place that’s right for them, and all working towards the same amazing future for themselves.

Brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.

In order to enabkle this great integration, I have to make it safe inside me for me to want things. To have desiires and to act on them. To let at least a few impulses through the border gate without being thoroughly vetted by the logic police.

As it stands now, even the suggestion of doing that sets off the alarms in my head and makes me feel dizzy and anxious. Acting on pure impulse without trying to think it through and check for intellectual contraband, like non-obvious negative consequences and future feelings of risk or anxiety?

I am not exaggerating when I way my entire psyche is built to prevent that.

It’s like at some point,. I acted on impulse, and it went very badly, and I decided that the problem was acting on impulse and that therefore I would never ever do that again.

I am stunned by the sheer magnitude of that kind of overgenerelization.

It’s ;like that thing I have talked about before : when a child burns their hand on a hot stove, the normal and healthy reaction is to learn to be cautious around hot things.

The unhealthy.and  neurotic reaction is to develop a lifelong fear/hatred of stoves. Or cooking, Or kitchens. Or the color red.

The completely psycho reaction is, of course, to blow up a Bed Bath and Beyond.

And yet I think that very overgenerlization haunts the lives of a lot of intellectual types like myself. In order to obtain the sort of clear symbolic logic and abstract reasoning that marks an intellectual, a person must learn to suppress all the other things going on in their head. and focus entirely on the cold-circuit task at hand.

Thus, the act of developing that high IQ requires a great deal of suppression. And a willingness – even a preference – to live in a cold, cold world.

Sure, we intellectuals have our pleasures and our drives and our passions. But they are all driven by cold-circuit emotions like curiousity, the search for clarity, the drive for perfection, and so on.

These are all real emotions – I am not saying intellectuals are emotionless robots. Far from it. We have the same emotions as everyone else.

The difference is that intellectual’s drives come from that cold citcuit that makes us seem like aliens to others. Hot circuit emotions, like anger, lust, and jealousy, are inherently mistrusted and suppressed, and in general can only express themselves in an intellectualized form.

So an intellectual will have lust – and express it through writing, pictures, or bizarre fetishes that exist because they are based on existing symbols in the mind that are powerful enough to make it through the intellectual bottleneck at the border by generating such a strong and deep emotional response that it overwhelms all inhibitors and floods the mind.

Not going to post that song again.

As a result of this odd setup, any given intellectual can end up living a strangely mismatched life driven by a motely collection of intellectual interests and absolutely unstoppable compulsions and aversions, with nothing in between.

In other words…. they have a hot side and a cold side that need to be united.

Hey,I made it back to the point!

I’m as surprised as you are.

In order to figure out what I reallyh want, I will have to ease back my border restrictions. And that’s going to take time. I am too rigid for transformational change. I can only do the kind of incremental change that eventually leads to small transformational changes once things reach a certain critical mass.

Wow, my imagery is all over the place tonight.

I think I may be building to one of those transformational moments.I told me therapist that I felt like something large was detaching itself from the main body of my psyche, and that eventually, it will fall off into the void of forgetting and never be seen again.

I’m rather looking forward to it. I don’t fear transformation, I just lack the flexibility to initiate it myself. I am ready for it to happen because I have total faith that I will be better off once the floodwaters recede and I am birthed naked onto that strange new shore.

I’m a poet who is too lazy to put it into poetry.

I wish I could run one of those :tune up your PC” programs on my brain. Get rid of all the junk files. Reconnect unused resources. Defrag my memories.

Anyhow, in order for this big transformation to occur, a big p[art of me has to die, and I think that’s why I have been feeling like I am in mourning lately.

Part of me is going away, and while I hate that part of me and want it to die, die, die, it was still part of me for a long long time. So I mourn.

It’s like excising a tumour. No matter how cancerous and metastatic and toxic that tumour was, it was still a part of you and still leaves a void where it once was.

You don’t have to approve of the crime to cry at the execution.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.