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.