Opening the Door

I am not a very open person.

I can fake it really well. I will talk to anyone about anything… well, almost anything.

That has more to do with the soecially retarded personès lack of a sense of socially acceptable boundaries. than anything else, but I still count it as a virtue.

But realistically, the real dirty little secret behind my seemingly being an open book is that I figured out, at a very early age, that when you are hiding something, your first line of defense is to erase all signs that you are hiding something.

You can then put said thing in amongst a huge number of similar but not identical things amd then open the doors tgo the public, knowing that the odds of them finding the thing you are hiding, which would take a number of very specific steps, are next to nothing.

And even if they did, they would find it blocked off.

Because if someone was to ask the right questions and breach my defenses, I can always just say that the subject is private and the threat is over.

And because I am otherwise such an open book, people will back off immediately and not give it a second thought. After all, itès just one small thing in a sea of readily available information. So what’s the big deal?

And the secret behind that secret is that alll those people out there browsing the displays amd reading the pamphets think they have gained entry to the real me.

But they haven’t. Nobody gets access to that. It is in a sub sub basement and hidden behind a secret panel and protected behind an ice-cold stainless steel wall ten feet thick, and the access code for the vault door is a billion numbers long, and if you get even one oif them wrong, a huge plexiglass wall comes down to further seal it off.

But if, somehow, you get through all that and gain illegal access to the real me…

God, I hope that never happens, Because I don’t know what I would do then. But it could be… bad.

Very very bad.

And that’s why I need to have the museum above, where the public can view a highly realistic version of the real me.

But it’s only a hologram.

Returning from my metaphor once more, what I am trying to get across is I have realized that I never actually let people in. I can’t. Not yet, anyhow. And that is why I have so much trouble connecting with most people.

My antenna’s not broken. I deliberately turned it off a long long time ago. And I will not be switching it back on any time soon.

When I was sexually assaulted at the age of three, a vitally important part of me went offline, and it hasn’t been online since. It was the central linkage between my myself and my id, and from that point on, everything had to reroute through the ego in order to stay connected with my consciousness.

And the ego just ain’t up to the job. A lot of very important communication between myself and the world is lost and it makes me feel like I am all alone in the world, that nobody loves me, that everyone I associate with does so out of pity for what a fucked up loser I am, and that I am doomed to wander the tundra naked till I die.

that’s how I ended up so brilliant and so damaged. My vital energies – what I call the stuff of life or life-force – got re-directed through this amazing brain of mind and powered it up to absurdly high levels while starving my soul.

In fact, my soul is so malnourished that it doesn’t work right at all.

And its malfunction is called “depression”.

And nobody gets in. I might seem like I am getting close to someone. I might fool the both of us into thinking that said person is really getting somewhere with me. That we are already so close because I have shared a lot with them and they have shared a lot with me. And I seem to know them so well and understand them very deeply.

But it’s all a trick, boys and girls. I do it all from a box behind the stage, where I pilot a very lifelike version of myself while remaining hermetically safe from everyone.

And all those layers of defenses you have seen me lower? That’s just to convince you that you are getting close. After all, you’ve passed through so many doors!

But you still have infinite space, cold and dead and inimical to anything living, to cross.

And I can always add more doors.

Being the Wizard of Oz, manipulating my puppets from behind the curtain, is what makes me so awkward on every level. It’s all being done by remote control, with a badly rewired brain holding the remote.

I can try as hard as I can to get good at piloting my robot self, but I am always going to be at a severe disadvantage compared to people actually living their lives in realtime.

I can produce all the brilliant illusions I want, and fool both the people and myself, but until the real me steps on stage, it will always be nothing but a show.

I can even do miracles and demonstrate powers far beyond the reach of mortal man, and I will still be frozen in my cage and dying from lack of oxygen.

Nothing will change until can finally unlock the door and let someone in. Or at least pull back the curtains and open a few windows to freshen up the place.

That’s my goal now : to open up that door. To unfreeze my connection to the world and thus let more of my lifeblood make it to my heart. To repair the damage done by a random pervert 41 years ago and rescue that little three year old boy from the dark and dreadful realm that put him in.

Maybe then, I will feel the sunshine on my soul.

Maybe then, I can live again.

Maybe then, I can know what it’s like to be people.

Maybe then, I will know what it’s like to be alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

Hall of Mirrors

I wonder if anyone cares enough about what happens next in the “Barny” storyline to make it worth writing.

For all my brave talk lately of writing for myself…. it does it very lonely sometimes.

And perhaps all my bravado about how I am currently writing for myself, writing things I would want to read in order to give to others what other people’s writing has done for me, is nothing but a thin patina of brazen braggadocio covering the same old fear of actually sending my work out into the world to be coldly judged by the gatekeepers of the written world.

And it’s occurred to me that perhaps I am being selfish. It occurred to me during therapy yesterday. My therapist and I talked about how I use my writing to explore various issues of my own and I told him the gist of the Barnacled Hermit plotline, and that led to some very fruitful discussion because, as it turns out, when you explain your meaty metaphors to your shrink, he can ask some very illuminating questions about them.

And that led to him suggesting that my writing could really help people. And that has always been my intention. I want to write things that shine light into the darkness of the isolated live of other people like me, and show them that they are not alone and that there is hope and that they, too, are beautiful.

But to have that idea invoked by him made me really think about whether it is selfish of me to keep my writing largely to myself and to never really focus down enough to make something I write professionally presentable, let alone send it out into the cold cruel world to fend for itself.

If my words are my babies, then submitting them to the gatekeepers is like sending your kid off to school for the first time. I don’t want to let go of them. I want to protect them from the hazards of the real world.

And just thinking about sending them out there to be judged provokes a lot of seperation anxiety in me, mother hen that I am.

And yet, I know I am brilliant. I know I could really contribute. I know my words could do a lot of good in the world.

So am I selfish for keeping them to myself? Do I have a duty to go out into the scrum of the world and fight to get noticed so my words can reach the people most in need of their medicinal effects?

I feel like the answer is an inevtiable yes. After all, imagine if your favorite author(s) had hoarded their words instead of getting them published? You would never have experienced their writing, and you would be the poorer for it.

And yet I can’t accept that because if I did, I would have to end my solitary wordsmithing and start working hard on gettiing published.

And that involves the risk of being plucked out of my little hole when something I wrote sells and there is now an expectation that I will keep going and striving and focusing on getting even more things published and at some point I might even have to talk with strangers on the phone or in person and my social anxiety givesme palpitations just thinking about it?

I guess I have a fear of success.

And a craving for it, of course. I feel like, at this point in my life, I am really feeling the divide between the healthy and unhealthy parts of my mind. The part that is terrified of interacting on a more than superficial and transitory way is obviously the unhealthy part of me, and I really don’t want to be that way.

The healthy part is the part that would love whatever recognition and accomplishment (and reward) might come my way if my writing was to meet with any approval at all.

The unhealthy part would prefer to toil in safe, pathetic obscurity. It quite likes the idea of piling up rejection notices without fear of publication.

That part of me is, quite obviously, insane.

And I want to be rid of it, and all its clutching panic and fretful fears and immobilizing terror. I wish I could just shed it like a second skin and leave it behind as something I have outgrown and stride into the future as the confident, calm, and collected creative tpye I know I can be.

But it’s not that easy. There’s real pain under all that ice and snow inside my heart, and until that shit it thawed out and dealt with, the pain will remain.

And I feel so shriveled up and weak lately. Like there is nothing to me. Like I have no life force in me, no heat to my blood, no pump in my heart. Like all my healthy hearty and hale emotions are frozen in a locked deep-freeze somewhere deep in the vast and icy warehouse of my soul.

What am I so afraid of? I ask myself. I know I can do this. I know my writing is fucking amazing and better than most of the crap out there. I know I could be very successful at writing if I just put myself out there.

But then I wouldn’t be able to scurry back to my hole whenever I got too freaked out! says the sick part of me. I would have to go out there and stay out there for long periods of time and cut way down on my alone time and, in short, I would have to deal with life.

And deep down, I don’t wanna.

But I do. But I don’t.

And so whether it’s indecision or indolence, I end up not going anywhere in my life, and that makes me sadder and sadder as I get older and older without even even getting started at life.

And some day I die without even making a ripple in the pond.

And when I have died, they will lower me into the earth.

But it won’t matter, because I was buried insde myself way before that.

And on both sides of the grave, I just sit there and rot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

The Further Adventures of Barny

The Barnacled Hermit (or “Barny”, as the media persisting in calling him). glanced nervously at the sky as he followed his blessedly familiar path around his tiny asteroid.

Technically, there was no need to do this. The signaling station maintained itself flawlessly. It was also entirely redundant as the signals it was designed to monitor weren’t merely obsolete, their entire spectrum had been replaced by a new technology called Modlar that made the station seem as absurd and ancient and primitive as communicating by tribal drum.

The station was, therefore, of merely historical signifigance, and to be honest, Barny had, technically, stolen it.

he was at least honest enough to admit that to himself and to not pretend that he had some noble purpose for it or that it was somehow better than all that newfangled quantum entanglement nonsense.

He needed it because it helped him feel sane.

He’d done a lot of crazy things for that reason.

Like search the galaxy tables for an asteroid identical to the one on which he had been stranded seven hundred years previous.

The original, of course, was now a religious site to which tourists flocked to visit the Shrine of Shimmering Purity (home to the Barnacled Adventists) and/or the Beacon of Life Temple (the separate but still technically in the same building headquarters of the Staff of Life/Circle of Birth cult).

Barny wouldn’t dream of going within a thousand light years of that place. It was embarrassing enough when he had only one religion founded in his name and purporting to espouse his beliefs and carry out his agenda.

But to have there be two? Two that constantly squabble over brutally tiny details like which part of the building was higher and therefore closer to God and whether their religious symbols were first on the “all religions welcome” sign?

That was more than any being should ever have to take.

Besides, large parts of their doctrines were mutually exclusive, so if Barny showed up and said practically anything, it would be interpreted as endorsing one side or the other and he’d end up being accused of heresy.

Even worse, the other side would then be hanging on every word their new spiritual said so they could add it to their holy scriptures.

And there was no way his programming could handle that level of responsibility.

That’s why he was now walking an unnecessary route around a hilariously obsolete signaling station on a very, very expensive asteroid with an even more expensive cloaking system that made it invisible to absolutely all known methods of detection in the known galaxy.

He just couldn’t take it any more. He had to escape. It had cost him most of the vast fortune he had unwillingly accumulated over the centuries to do it, but now he was as safe from the huddled masses as he could could, so it had all been worth it.

Nevertheless, he watched the skies with paranoid intensity, convinced that despite all the measures he had taken, some kind of spaceship was going to land in front of him one day and say “At last! Joyous Day! The Second Finding has come! We’re going to take you to be our leader!. ”

The fact that he’d been forced to improvise some babble about “going on a spiritual journey to find the true source of all meaning” before he disappeared did not help the situation at all.

He’d had no idea the effect that vague nonsense would have on the human mind. Instead of writing him off as a useless cipher like he had thought they would. it had driven the humans into a frenzy of speculation and projection of their own agendas onto his words, and made them all the more determined to find him again in what was now universally called the Second Age.

And all from a string of spiritual sounding words he’d made up on the spot in order to dodge a determined looking interviewer.

There was so much he would never understand about humans.

Not that his fellow robots were any better. Sure, they vehemently denied that their “Research Societies” and “Study Institutes” and “Foundling Universities” were not, in way shape or form,  religious institutions, Barny wasn’t fooled.

He knew fanaticism and worship when he saw it.

After all. he’d been the victim of it enough times.

So now he spent his days in the only place where he felt sane, or at least, where he felt the least crazy.

If you are honest with yourself. there is only many times you can check the sky for something you know, logically, cannot be there and still consider yourself sane.

That’s why when a vehicle actually did appear. he hadn’t noticed right away. There had been, shall we say, false positives many times before, and he had gotten into the habit of discounting anything he thought he saw up there unless it gave him a clear, unambiguous sign that it was here to stay.

This it did by landing, rather sloppily,  directly in front of him and disgorging what had to be the ugliest human Barny had ever seen. The man (?) seemed to be made of warts, scars, and clump of unwholesome looking hair.

This should be a good one, thought Barny, who had become somewhat of a connisuer of hallucinations as of late.

The “human” glared at Barny with insect-black eyes for a few minutes. then waddled aggressively up to Barny and glared at him some more.

Dqarny was impressed with himself. He wouldn’t have thought he had the imagination to creature such a thoroughly repulsive creature. but obviously, he had.

The “man” walked around an utterly fascinated Barny like he was appraising Barny’s value as livestock and wasn’t too impressed. At least, that’s what Barny thought those grunts and half-enunciated words meant.

And then “he” said the words that would once more shatter the Barnacled Hermit’s world and make him have to rethink everything all over again.

“So who the hell are you?”.

 

Time keeps on slippin’

This was almost “Slip Slidin’ Away” by Paul Simon, but I think I used that one before and I hate repeating myself.

Repeating myself. I hate it. I hate repeating myself.

I’ve been feeling better lately. I still have a lot of anger and bitterness and darkness floating around in this capacious cranium of mine, but I don’t feel so helpless against it.

Things got pretty bad there for a while. In fact. I have a secret to tell, and you’re going to have to promise never to let Joe know this, but…

I was utterly miserable for the whole time I was at his parents’ place for Xmas dinner.

Not their fault. They were lovely people as always. The food was wonderful. I had some very nice champagne and a glass of surprisingly deep and complex white wine.

Sharp start, slow sweet finish, with an elusive suggestion of something mysterious. Quite nice. And I’m in general a red wine guy.

Oh, what the heck.

The alcohol didn’t help with the depression. It never has, which I suppose is a good thing. I know I can’t drink my sorrows away.

In fact, liquor usually makes them worse because instead od being merely depressed. I end up depressed and stupid.

And I hate being stupid.

And I am sure that on the outside, I seemed to be having a good time. I am, of course, a master thespian when it comes to hiding my pain.

After all,. I wouldn’t want to make anyone else feel bad by exposing them to my pain. It’s bad enough to be miserable on my own.

To have my pain reflected back at my via empathy would be much too much.

Besides. it’s not like people can handle the real me anyhow. M darkness is deadly because it devours. It would eat people up and barely even notice. I have such an enormous void within me and it is composed of so many desperately unmet needs that to touch it is to have the life drained right out of you in less than a heartbeat.

Or so I believe.

And so I wear the mask even in the worst of circumstances. On the outside I was normal enough. But on the inside I was in a lot of pain.

And yet, I think this is something I have to go through. It’s the next phase of my recovery. I have to once more pass through th eye of the needle in order to burn away yet more of my emotional debris so that I might be free of it.

Or so I hope, any way. We all all want our suffering to mean something.

I have found myself turning back to the subject of people who act on their emotions lately, and how hard it is for me to even imagine that.

And yet. presumably, that’s how a lot of humanity lives, at least partiallty. Like I have said. I know my incredibly high standard of self-control is inhuman and unhealthy.

But I can’t see my way to lowering it. Because I know.  I know that I would be deciding to hand over power to forces I do not trust or understand. I lack the innocence of blind emotion, aka “not knowing any better”.

I aways know better. That’s part of the problem. I have always seen too much and known too much for my own good. The idea that superior clarity and perception could prove toxic is highly alien to someone like me who is always striving to see more. anjd know more and understand more of the big picture.

But maybe the human pysche can only take so much of life outside Plato’s cave. at least on an emotional level. Maybe I have spent a lot of time making my mind happy at the expense of my soul.

In fact, maybe in addition to my overactive superego, I have a vaslty overindulged ego, and it’s my poor little id whimpering in a corner that suffers as a result.

Almost like I was raised by one angry and punitive parent and one highly intellectual parent in a household intolerant of many normal human emotions.

I feel like I am forever falling into myself. Perhaps that’s my touch of dizziness talking. But I feel like I am spinning as I fall down an infinite hole that gets smaller in diameter at regular intervals, and as it gets smaller. my soul shrinks and weakens in order to fit.

Until one day, presumably,. when I disappear entirely.

The prospect in not entirely unappealing.

I feel so tiny and helpless and weak sometimes. The fact that on the outside, I appear to be none of those things only makes it worse. As hard as I work to conceal my pain from all. I also long to be able to share it with someone so I don’t feel so alone.

Perhaps that is part of the British Disease we inherited from our colonial parents here in Canada : being filled with emotions you long to express. but reserve and politeness keep them locked inside you.

At least I have this blog. I try my best to empty out my emotions onto this page faster than they accumulate so that I get ahead of the game more often than not.

And with everything I write, I learn to put more and more of myself and my emotions into every word. It’s like I am trying to escape my mentla prison via my words, and when I am done, I will be reborn as someone who is a lot more whole and strong and happy than the pathetic wretch who types at you every day.

FOr the slow kids at the back of the class, that’s me.

I am going to try to put myself back together in the New Year. I have lost a lot of ground in the time since I left VFS and it’s going to be a pitched battle to get it back.

But as long as I stay mad at the whoe situation, there is hope.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Stumbling out of the gate

Woke up at 11:38 am. Then drifted off again, and woke up at 2:26 pm.

That was a bit of a jolt! I hate it when I sleep past noon. It always makes me feel like I am wasting my day. Like I missed the bus in a really big way and now I will be struggling to catch up for the rest of the day.

This isn’t the result of some moral lesson I was taught at some point, or some abstract sense of punitive self-discipline.

If only. If I had that, I might get a lot more done.

No. it’s more a matter of a fear of missing out or of being left behind by life. I don’t like feeling like I have fallen behind. It was the single overriding factor that got my ass out of bed and on the way to class every day when I was at Kwantlen and VFS.

Even when all other motivations failed, all I had to do was imagine all my classmates going on ahead leaving me behind as they learned and I didn’t, and the resulting panic would get my out of bed and into action.

Comes from a childhood where I was always in danger of literally being left behind because nobody paid much attention to me and so I ended up feeling like it was my job to make sure I did not get abandoned somewhere.

Plus, I will admit, I had a tendency to wander a little. And sometimes a lot, when it came to those times I have described before when my parents would take me with them someplace and I would get bored and nobody was paying any attention to me, so I would wander off, a happy little cloud drifting around taking in the sights.

Leaving my poor parents to freak out when they realized they had no idea where I was. They would find me and I would be like, “I wasn’t lost! I knew exactly where I was!”/

Because kids lack perspective.

To be honest, though, I have no idea how much of my childhood sense of total isolation was caused by events in the world and how much was caused by the thick and icy wall of emotional armor that my childhood depression caused.

Tbhe exact ration doesn’t matter, I suppose. There were definitely times when I was actively rejected,.ejected, beaten down, pushes out, given the cold shoulder, disinvited, unincluded, and beaten soundly by life.

And people. Mostly people.

In manjy ways, my choldhood days seem almost unreal to me now. I find it hard to relate to that level of passivity now. I am much feistier now. and a lot more capable of making my needs known and demanding they be met.

It’s taken me 40 yars to get to this point, though. And I am still not exactly an expert at it. I still have a very strong tendency to retreat into myself rather than deal with things.

And that is, more or less, the definition of being a loser.

Losers quit. They give up. They escape, rather than deal. Winners fight. Losers flee.

I’d rather be a winner. I think the potential exists in me. I have a strong combative side and a huge well of stubborn defiance that, at least on paper, could be turned into the sort of “fuck you, I am getting what I want” attitude towards life that could prove to be highly productive in getting shit done.

With the more than slight chance of turning me into a beligerent asshole who takes a kill crush and destroy attitude towards life where I am  ready willing and able to do whatever it takes to pursue my own needs.

But how much do I really value being a nice person? Maybe if I was a little less nice, I would be a lot happier, because I would feel like I had some way of protecting myself from the crushing forces of my own sensitivity. Right now, I often feel like other people’s concerns and identities cna override mine at any point, leading me to isolate myself.

Well, one of many things that cause me to isolate myself, anyhow.

I have this vision of myself as a happy, confident, charming, dazzling person – more or less a real life version of Fruvous in human form – and I want to be that person so bad.

I could be pretty frigging amazing like that, to be honest. A real force of nature.

But there’s so much emotional garbage in the way. So much stagnant toxic water to clear from my system. So much radioactive sludge to purge.

I feel so weak lately. Like there is nothihng solid within me to push against in order to get things done. Like all my motivation just disappears into a seamless void and I end up hiding from the world instead when I try to get myself going.

I feel so very, very, very cold inside. And all I want is for that to end so I can feel alive again. I don’t know how I iced up inside like this. I know that I was not always thois way and that at some point in the not that distant past, I felt a lot more alive and warm and whole and strong and connected with life.

But lately, I have felt so bad. I have felt like all I truly wanted to do was crfawl into bed and sleep forever.

Even reading sometimes makes me feel exposed.

It makes me wish I could just vanish for a while. Not be anywhere at all. Hide in nonexistence until I could figure things out and get my head on straight.

Yeah, I know that makes no sense. Whatever.

I feel like I have drifted into interstellar space and it;s only  matter of time before the clutching cold of the void overtakes me and my life support fails.

And I don’t want to go. I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to burst into uprorious life  like a new star and shine bright and hard for all the world to see.

But first… someone needs to defrost me.

Because I’m dying out here all alone.

And nobody can reach me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

Up from the pit

Just woke up. Feel like used shit. So, par for the course.

So this is Christmas. Big frigging deal. The way I feel right now, I kind of wish it was just another ordinary day. I just want to hide in sleep until the whole thing is over and I can go back to my usual pathetic existence as the world’s smartest barnacle, stuck to some rock somewhere, taking in nutrients and putting out BS without making the slightlest impact on the world.

In other words, I don’t feel very good.

As is tradition, I will be having dinner with Joe’s parents tonight. Every year, they are kind enough to invite me to Christmas dinner, and I always have a good time.

Right now, however, I am terrified/. This is what I have to go through every time I have to go places and do things, and of course, the more novel the setting,m the more terrified I am,

SO every single time, I have to overcome this clutching panic that makes me want to run and hide and that makes me feel like this upcoming exposure is a hostile and brutal act, even if I know, intellectually, that I will enjoy it.

Good thing there will be liquor. It helps.

Because I know that no matter how I seem on the inside, I will be panicking on the inside for the first little while at least. Perhaps that is what I am dreading, on a deep level. Sure, I know I will chill out eventually and have a good time, but at first, I will be freaking out, and there isn’t a goddamned thing I can do about it.

And so I cling to my rock and shout “no no no!” until I am hoarse, and end up having to drag myself kicking and screaming into something I will enjoy once I get over myself.

It’s not easy to be me.

I wish I could just… heal. Free myself of all my toxins and wake up purged and clean and free of all the pollution and putrid clinging fog that makes my life so hard. It would be worth going through a period of pain and grossness and sickening horror if it meantthat at the end of it all, I was clean.

I haven’t felt truly clean in so long that it would be bliss. Like that euphoric feels you get when the fever breaks and you suddenly feel SO much better that you just lay there with a big dumb grin on your face, blissed out.

If they could sell that feeling in a bottle, they would make a billion dollars.

Oh right, they do, and it’s called Oxycontin. And there’s a lot of drawbacks.

Because life can never just give you happiness or even pleasure without exacting some kind of revenge in the form of side effects.

Not even sex can provide you with blessed release without taking its toll one way or another. You can never truly get ahead.

It’s still pretty nice, though. Or so I have heard.

That’s another lovely thing going wrong with me lately. I can’t “get there”. Every time I try to masturbate, there comes a moment when the engine suddenly cuts out and I end up giving up on the whole thing because the energy is gone and I lose all interest in the act, and end up frustrated and irritated and wishing I was healthy.

Or at least functional.

I feel so weak and helpless. Like there is nothing solid in my psyche any more. No dry land. No water, even. Just me floating in outer space, unable to generate any thrust, everything in me spilling out to form a putrid cload around me while I choke on my own fumes and squirm in pain.

The urge to turn inwards and block out reality and all its painful stimulations is strong in me right now.

Thjat’s a big part of why I want to sleep so much. Sleep is like death but without the commitment. It’s the furthest from reality I can get while alive.

It’s that, or Skyrim, which at least keeps my mind busy and thus keeps the icy violations of depression’s fetid fingers from tearing my mind apart for a while.

Idle minds are depression’s playground, after all.

Although who knows. Maybe this mental marathon of mind is both the cause and the treatment of my issues. Maybe what I really need is to spend some time away from the computer and its diverse amusements so my mind can xclear itself and get down to some serious healing without this constant mental smorgasbord to digest.

I wish I knew someone with a nice little cabin somewhere in the interior of BC where I could escape for a while with nothing but books and a computer to write on. One with absolutely nothing on it but a simple word processor.

That way, there would be nothing for me to do but read and write. I could just write and write and write until I catch up with the backlog and reach some kind of equilibrium between my interbnal pressures and the world outside my head.

Of course, from a simplistic point of  view, I could do all that right now.

But it’s not that easy. Not when I habve access to my drug of choice – video games, Skyrim in particular – in unlimited amounts right at my fingertips.

As it sits right now, I know that I can go to Skyrim and make time pass more or less pain free whenever I feel like it. And I have far too much of the escapist in me to be able to resist that for very long.

My usual maximum time without the treat in my mouth is about how long it takes for me to write one of these blog entries.

And thank goodness for them, because without these – and you, gentle reader – I would be sompletely trapped in my own mind.

And that would truly be Hell.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

The long dark Christmas of the soul

You’re lucky. I almost called this entry “Smiling on the razor’s edge of oblivion*.

In fact…. what the hell….

Smiling on the razor’s edge of oblivion

The jester points a gun at his head
The clown ties a noose
The life of the the party sets his hair on fire
The gentle giant sucks on a fuse

The merry-maker makes out a will
Hey Buddy! You’re driving too slow
The happy guy ties his posoned tie
The ringmaster bleeds into snow

Another show, another piece of myself
I laugh as I watch it go
And sooner or later, there’ll be none of me left
And then, with a bow, I shall go.

Don’t worry, I am not suicidal.

But writing that made me feel better.

Perhaps my real p[roblem is that I never let my demons out into the world. My therapist keeps telling me that I should use my dark thoughts in my writing. Maybe in horror stories. He is probably right.

Might as well get some good out of them.

But first. I would need to get over my fear of abandonment. I have a terrible, soul-wrenching fear that if I am anything less than totallyh entertaining to people, they will awake frfom my spell and realize how horrible I am, and flee from me forever.

Not true, of course. But I believe it nevertheless, because some feeling cannot be overcome by logic, evidence, reasonability, or even self-interest.

They are too deep for that. Logic and reason can only access beliefs that are based, at least in part, on logic and reason.

The really deep stuff is not, and is thus inaccesssible to these powerful instruments. People believe what they need to believe, even when it’s not what they want to believe, and for me that means I find it very hard to believe that anyone wants me around.

Instead, I feel like people resent my being around at all and can’t wait for me to leave so they can go back to the wonderful world where I don’t exist and they will never ever have to deal with me again.

“Oh, thanki God that HE is gone! I could not have put up with one more minute of that guy. I seriously would have gone insane. ” 

“I know. He’s lucky he’s so pathetic. Otherwise I would have told him to fuck off ages ago. But that would be too much like kicking a puppy. ” 

“A smelly puppy who thinks everyone loves it, maybe. But yeah. Can’t stand thje guy but I could never tell him that. It wojuld be too sad. ” 

“Yup. Guess we’re stuck with him, then,. ” 

“*sigh* Yeah, I guess so. At least until we move. ” 

Ladies and gentlemen, the voices in my head.

I guess this is the year I finally give up on Xmas. I have very little Xmas spirit in me this year. In fact I am dangerously close to hating the whole fucking thing for making me feel a lot worse than usual because I am so… god damned… alone.

I mean, where does this holiday get off, making me feel horrible? It’s just some arbitrary date nowhere near Jesus’ actual birthday.

I mean we’re in Capricorn right now, and He was clearly a Pisces. The compassion, the understanding, the gentleness, the foot fetish…. it’s like really super clear.

I mean, what’s next, thinking Mars is a Leo?

But I know that, in my heart of hearts., I could never turn my back on Xmas and become one of those bitter humbuggers who treat the holiday like a bitter ex-lover.

Xmas is too me for that. All the love, family,. togetherness, compassion, open-heartedness, gentleness, and giving are totally my kind of thing. If I could invent a holiday it would be one a lot like Xmas.

But with sex.

So I might have to harden my heart against it a little in the future just to keep myself safe on these dark nights. Close some doors to keep the darkness out and thus stay out of the Bad Place where everything is dark abd cold and I can’t see or feel anything or anyone and I feel so alone that I just want to give up and leave.

But when it’s life you are trying to escape, there is only one way out, and it’s that door marked Death. And that door can be very tempting sometimes.

And that is what’s so scary about it. If it was not seductive with all its lies about how it will end all my suffering and how I will feel so much better after,

But I won’t, because I will not be here to feel anything. And it would make so many people sad if I were to die, and if it was by my own hand that would devastate absolutely everyone who knows me.

And I could never do that to them.

Suicide is such a selfish thing to do.

So I will keep going, for them and for me. Keeping going no matter what. That seems to be a speciality of mine. Trudging eternally onwards. sometimes slowing, sometimes resting on my feet. but never actually stopping.

Because iuf I stopped, I might never get going again. That’s been my fear for a very long time. That somehow, if I let it all go. I will lose all my powers and end up in the same position but without anything at all to offer the world to justify my existence.

Better to be a failed wizard than just some asshole with a sad life story.

Of course. that’s an insane thought. My gifts come from inherent strengths, not some program I have been running and hacking since birth. If anything, a cold reboot would clear a lot of useless resource-sapping background programs out of the working mameory and let me booot fresh and clean.

Now if only I could find my reset button.

Then I could finally get rid of all the static in my mind.

But then I would have to actually deal with things.

And that’s thje scariest thought of them all.

I will talk to you nice people tommorrow.

Oh, and merry xmas, everybody. I love you all/.

 

Sleeping after noon

I wouldn’t recommend it.

Took a nap this afternoon and woke up at 7:45 pm. That means I slept for almonst fours hours when I thught I just needed to rest my eyes for a bit.

Must have needed it pretty bad.

I was up till 8:30 am last night/today, so that probably didn’t help matters. But I have been awake four 45 minutes now and I still feel like shit.

To me, every time I go to sleep, I risk waking up feeling a lot worse than I did when I went to sleep.

That should not even be possible. That should not even be a thing.

So right now, I feel quite dizzy. Every time I move my head, I feel the fluids in my skull sloshing in the same direction and it makes me feel like my head weighs 20 pounds and is filled with Jello.

If’s you’re a non-transexual sissy, that makes you a cississy.

As a result of this dizziness, ze word, zhey do not come easy right now. Typing feels like trying to play darts on a ship at sea in rough weather.

I was on a ferry in rough weather once. Luckily, I was young and healthy and energetic, so to me, it was a wacky adventure. People lurching about, small items rolling back and forth on the floor, deciding I didn’t need to pee that bad…

Did not occur to me that I could have done it sitting down. Probably would not have done it anyhow, though.

We men have complex feelings about such things.

I still can’t believe there are households where the men have to sit down when they pee. Like it’s a rule.

First of all, how the hell is that enforced? Random inspections? Some female member of the household suddenly barging in to make sure your peeing is up to code?

If they tried that with me, they should be warned, the first three rows WILL get wet.

Barring such monstrous offences against human dignity, it’s pretty much on the honour system. You can pee however you like and nobody will know. You could whizz while doing a handstand and eating a banana and that would be your little secret.

Provided you do not leave a mess, of course. That is the actual, sane rule : don’t leave pee on things. It’s gender-neutral and more than reasonable and it doesn’t make anyone feel persecuted.

And honestly, having that kind of rule in place is, to me, a clear sign that morale is dangerously low and that a situatuion wherein both the victor and the vanguished are worse off than if the battle had never occurred.

The vagina-bearing members of the household might feel like they won a victory against the evil forces of male crudity. but at what cost?

Can you truly say you repsect the penis-bearers of the household as much as you did before this little tussle?

This is true of all emasculating victories in the war between the sexes. It always leads to a loss of respect for the males. Which cna lead to further assaults on masculibnity because, subconciously, the females want that respect back and so they want to see the male(s) fight back and show some spunk.

Don’t leave spunk on things either, guys.

I’m with my Dad when he says that everyone is healthier and happier when there is gender balance. And that includes a power balance. If either side gets too big of an upper hand, things get toxic and ugly and abusive.

Anyhow. So today has not been great. Not terrible, but a lot less than wonderful. The negative side of bleh, I suppose.

Tomorrow is Xmas eve. I don’t have anyone’s gift yet. Whatever. I have been quite ill with the depression lately and therefore performing below my usual “bare minimum on a good day” ;level of functionality.

I wish I could reboot myself. Restore everything to lab-tested factory defaults. Start over with fresh, healthy blood, no toxins in my tissues, ganglia and synapses cleansed and polished and ready to go to work.

The fog in me is thick these days. I try to fight it and forcve my mind into a state of clarity, but all I can seem to do is see the fog more clearly.

It’s like cleaning the lens of a kaleidoscope. All it does is make it easier to see the incomprehensible swirls of colors better.

<—————————————————————————————————————–>

Had to take another nap in order to recover from the first one.

I think it was a net gain. Hard to be sure.

I think my sleep apnea is getting worse. That’s what untreated illnesses tend to do, after all. I am pretty sure that I have been rocking a very low blood oxygen level lately and. combined with the high blood sugar level from my untreated diabetes, I think it is safe to say that if blood tests were real tests, I would fail.

I feel like a satellite in a decaying orbit, slowly spiraling downward and unable to do a damned thing about it except watch as I get closer and closer to crashing.

Except in this case, crashing will likely mean ending up in the hospital.

I’m getting that urge to walk away from it all again. To set fire to my life and watch it burn, then walk off into the sunset, free and alone and unattached.

It is, I admit , a rather radical way to reboot myself.

But it would feel so good to get out of my own shadow and start anew. Right now, I feel trapped by my life. Trapped by who I have been and who people know me to be. Trapped by memories of failures and the knowledge of how much life I have missed. Trapped by my own dowward spiral.

Trapped into being this pathetic version of myself.

It makes me want to move someplace where nobody knows me so I could reinvent myself and make my life a better expression of who I am.

Again, that’s a radical solution, and there are probably less extreme ways to accomplish more or less the same thing.

But sometimes I look out the window and dream of escape.

I want to fly away forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

The goal posts move

Here’s the thing about depression : it seeps deep into your fundamental self-image.

Not just the stuff we cna see (so to speak), like poor self-esteem, self-loathing, and so on, but into one’s very conception of self, and is the very foundation of one’s consciousness. Everything in our mind steams from and relates to this self-image.

Anything that threatens to change that self-image, therefore, has the potential to destabilize the entire psyche, and is therefore a threat to the individual in a very real and extremely deep sense.

This is true even of things which might seem good. Take a random teacher and imagine them getting really good at algebra, for example. You might think that is the sort of thing that can only be good. Better grades, better life, right?

But deeper down, the onflict becomes obvious. Our random teen might not ever get to be any good with algebra not because they lack the ability to learn it, but because they do not think of themselves as the sort of person who is good at algebra. 

And if that is true, then no amount of studying, prepping, or tutoring is going to change that. All that positive input is going to be stopped at the door by the teen’s sense of identity and told to go home because it simply does not fit the teen’s self-image.

And this is important : the teen has no idea any of this is going on. From their point of view. all they know is that they keep trying their hardest to learn the subject and yet they are still not getting any better at it.

That’s why I, if I was a professional tutor (and I probably could be), I would ask my student to describe their picture of someone who is good at the subject is, and then ask them if they want to be that kind of person.

That way, I could get right to the heart of the issue without wasting a bunch of time trying to teach that which they do not. fundamentally. want to learn.

I might even ask them to imagtine telling their friends they did really well on a test in the subject, and see how they feel about that.

To the human mind, absoluitely nothing is more important than identity.

I seem to have wandered astray, as usual. Back to the subject.

For a depressed person, their self-image, no matter how negative, is defended with great vigor precisely because it’s so fundamnetal to their conception of self.

It is a battle of identity just like it was with the algebraically challenged teen.

And that’s why we depressives exhibit the seemingly paradoxical behaviour of vigorously defending their negative self-image from all forces that threaten it.

We will fight tooth and nail, if necessary, to deny anything that might make us feel better about ourselves. This can be rather stressful to those close to the depressive as from their point of view, they are only trying to help when they point out that the depressive has a lot of good traits and are getting heavy, often impassioned resistance from the depressive in return for their kindness and goodwill.

Depressive Person : I’m so sick and I am in constant agony!
Non-Depressed Person : Here, have some medicine to cure it.
Depressive Person : FUCK OFF! You are the worsr person ever! I hate you!
Depressive Person (ten minutes later) : I am so sick, and I am in constant agony!
Depressiver Person (five minutes later) : Nobody’s helping,. They must all hate me.

That’s why uou get people who have everything we are taught should make us happy – money, career, family, material goods, high status, the respect of their peers, you name it – and still hate themselves.

None of that shit matters if you fundamentally consider yourself to be a sad person. At best, the acquisition of such things can provide temporary relief from a negative self-image but that soon drains away as that fundamental self-image reasserts itself and sets everything back to its level.

Hence affirmations. It might seem mindless and styupid to look in the mirror and say nice things to yourself over and over,. but it’s actually quite wise.

It’s an attempt to change that fundamental self-image and thus make happiness and positive self-worth a possibility.

Otherwise, you are the donkey chasing the carrot, and the donkey can only chase that carrot for so long before it gives up because no matter how far it travels, the carrot never gets any closer.

The goal posts move.

It’s the only way the mind has to maintain the negative self-image in the face of potentially identity-threatening positive input.

If I was a therapist  (and I could…. okay, the boat’s probably sailed on that one), it would be this fundamental self-image I would be trying to change. No easy task – as I said above, the patient will likely fight you tooth and nail over this, and so the approach would have to be oblique and subtle.

But nobody is going to be happy unless their deep self-image changes to accept the idea of themselves as a happy person. Until they do, their sense of identity – which always has top priority – will resist any progress that they make and lurk in the shadows, waiting to put things back to “normal”, until the day they die.

Take my own case. I have ample evidence that I am an extraordinary person. I have abilities the average person would sell their left arm right nut to possess. I am very bright, highly talented, and a heck of a nice guy to boot.

And yet I still hate myself and thibnk the world would be a better place without a liability like myself around a lot of the time.

To imagine thinking otherwise – to imagine believing that I am awesome, full stop, no qualifiers, no counterarguments – fills me with deep deep terror.

Because if that were to happen, I wouldn’t even know who I was any more.

And that’s the scariest thing imaginable.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My new friend

WARNING :  Tonight’s entry is going to contain explicit talk about my new sex toy and where it goes, so if that’s way more thabn you want to know, feel free to skip it. 

So my Xmas gift to myself this year is a sleek newfangled type anal vibrator.

It’s this odd little critter here.

Check out that “product name”.

Vibrating Prostate Massager- Waterproof G-Spot Vibrator With Remote Control Anal Plug – 30 Stimulation Modes Improve Urinary and Sexual Performance USB Rechargeable Medical Silicone Vibrators for Men

I miss those long lost days when things on Amazon had names meant to be read instead of an SEO word salad meant to include every single possible relevant keyword and thus make that product the top search.

Anyhow. As you can see, it isn’t shaped like a penis, or at least not one from Earth. That made me a little reluctant to buy it at first. To be honest, it looks more like a power tool or ray gun from a science fiction movie than anything else.

I suppose that would turn some people on.

But I decided to get it anyway. And despite the season, it took only a couple of days to arrive. Yesterday, I unboxed it.

Only to make a sad face when I realized its remote control was missing.

Yes, that’s right. Remote control. Today, even the butt toys are wireless. And the problem with it being missing is that you can’t start the show. so to speak, withouit it.

All you can do is turn the unit on or off, sans those good, good, good, good vibrations.

SO I went to Amazon.ca to look up the order and hence (so I thought) be able to contact the vendor directly. Mope! All my other orders have a “contact the seller” button. but not this one.

So I left a bad review and a 1 star rating. That should get their attention,. I thought

Luckily, I found the remote today, and so I was able to give my new toy a “test drive”. I forgot to order lube to go with it but I have, shall we say, plenty of room in back for cargo, so I don’t really need it.

SO I laid down,. turned it on, and inserted it.

That was quite lovely. That weird looking design really works. I was able to bury it to the hilt, with that egg shaped tip spreading me in marvelous ways, with barely any fuss and certainly no pain.

I was having a good time already and I hadn’t even turned the vibrations on yet.

Once I did, things got, of course, even better. And boy, is this thing versatile. It has ten vibration patterns, each with three possible intensity settings, meaning it technically has thirty modes of operation.

However, I am a big boy and there’s a lot of my tender area to vibrate, so “low” and “medium” settings just aren’t going to cut it for me.

Which leads to my first critique. Even on the highest setting, I wish the vibrations were stronger. No doubt they are plenty strong for people of average size, both in the chassis and in the trunk, so it’s not really a product fault.

I just happen to be built like an ox, and therefore would probably require something with jackhammer strength to get the same effect.

That quibble aside, the vibrations were nevertheless quite pleasant and playing with the different patterns was great fun. They range from the standard (constant on) to the slightly more complex (on, off, on, off), to rather complex syncopated jungle beats (on, on, on. ON!)that are really quite fascinating.

It really should have a “shuffle” mode so you have no idea what the heck is coming next. The suspense alone could be highly erotic.

The only other problem I had was that my build makes any such product tricky to use. It always involves awkward angles and a certain amount of strain on my arms and wrists. That tends to subtrqact from the pleasure of it all.

This goes quadruple when I try to masturbate at the same time.

Still, I had a lot of fun and, while ejaculation did not occur, I definitely feel very “awakened” by the experience and look forward to further exploration and discovery of this toy and butthole pleasure in general.

Ideally, I will find something that really “does it” for me, and thus improve my sex life. And my regular life too, because I am increasingly sure that a lot of my anxiety and tension comes not from deep seated psychological traumae from my past but unexpressed horniness in the present.

As sex-positive as I am, I tend to completely ighnore my own sexual needs most of the time. I tune them out just like I tubne out al the rest of my desires.

Or at least the ones that can’t be fulfilled via playing video games and eating.

But now that my late adolescence has kicked in and my libido is rising, that is no longer viable. Maybe it never was. I don’t know.

What I do klnow is that I want to embrace this awakening sexualuity as fully as I can because it’s a powerful energy source for the fight against my inner freezing and I need all the life-affirming, happy inputs I can get.

I’ve talked on and on about trying to integrate my id and use it as a source of energy for renewel, joy, and just plaihn getting out of my own head and experiencing that life in the sunshine that I have been seeking over all these years.

The release of physical tension could be a huge boon too. Might do more for my mood than any antidepressant. It certainly could cut way back on my background tension levels and thus give me more distance between myself and anxiety.

And, of course, it would feel reallty good. And that;s a big deal. Pleasure tells us we are good dogs, and that’s vital for self-esteem.

So all in all, sticking fun stuff up my butt is a really good thing.

Of course, what would really do the trick is having a man fuck me up the ass.

But ya know…. baby steps.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.