There are timnes when I think I should start drinking just so I have a reason to feel like used crap all the time.

I mena, I feel hung over right now and all I did was sleep.

At least if I was a drinker, I would have had some fun first. And who knows, the muscle relaxant effect of alcohol might leave me better off in the long run.

But ten there’s the diabetes. There’s always that goddamned diabetes.

I guess I have been doing okay. Getting through the day via Skyrim, as per usual. As usual, it threatens to crowd out all other potential activities.

And as usual, I feel helpless to change things.

I wonder if there are support groups for people like me. SOmeplace I could go where I couid talk about having a video game that you are addicted to.

Skyrim Anonymous, more or less.

I suppose I should be glad that I have tons of free time in which to feed the addiction.  Then again, maybe that’s the problem. If I had more demands on my time, maybe I wouldn’t have played it so much and maybe I would have developed the ability to set reasonable boundaries early on.

In general, I would benefit from having more things to do with my time. Blogging and/or prose keeps me going but it doesn’t make me feel like I have advanced my cause any.further. It doesn’t get me anywhere.

It just  make the time go by easy. And, on a good day, is also a lot of fun.

But the main draw is that it keeps this mighty overmuscled mind of mine busy. When I am deep into Skyrim, I am not thinking about anything else. My monkey mind is bestilled and I feel calm and engaged and alive.

I’d really like to be able to tame those damned monkeys. My mind is always so full of thought processes, most of them subconscious, but all of them loud. I keep hopinjg I will get to a place where I have something that can take all the mental energy I throw at it and that really uses my creative and analytical skills in a productive and hopefully lucrative fashion. Something where I can self-actualize.

Instead, I play a video game all the fucking time.

At least, I keep telling myself, I am happy. Sort of. At least I am happy while I am playing and enough is going on that my growing discontent with my lot in life is kept quiet. So there’s that.

But other times, I feel split in two. Part of me is having fun playing Skyrim but the other half of me is screaming and jumping up and down and pulling its hair out because it’s just not enough. I need more. I need to connect to life.

But it is so easy to just let life slide by as I playh in my private playground of the mind, only emerging to write, eat, and sleep.

Maybe I would be better off if it hurt more.

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

I keep telling myself that, any day now, I will log back into UpWork and go looking for more freelance work so I can at least advance my so-called career.

But I keep coming up with excuses to put it off. It’s become a joke of sorts, and the punchline is my wasted life. To do it would be to leave my cozy coffin of a life and go out into the real world, and I am far more comfortable remaining fictional.

Once again, I wonder where all that energy and enthusiasm I had right after I graduated from VFS went, I was so full of ambition and energy and verve back then.

And when I got the Uno gig, it felt like I was getting somewhere. My life was a lot better back then when I had a genuinely productive thing to do every day.

But I ended all that for reasons that now seem quite suspect. At the time, I told myself I was going to go rustle up another gig pronto.

That was months ago, and in tha time I have logged into UpWork twice. And even then, I did not stick with it for long. After all, joib hunting on UpWork was boring and stressful and involves dealing with myriad possibilities which challenge my sense of my own competence and capacities.

Why subject myself to that, says my depression, when I can just play Skyrim?

And so I once more lapsed into hiding from reality into the world of the mind where I feel the most comfortable.

When I quit the Uno job and failed to keep the momentum going by immediately hunting up another job, even a dumb scutwork job like that insane data entry.rephrasing job, I was doing my depression’s bidding and listening to the wrong voice in my head.

And I always know when I am listening to that wrong voice, that one I call The Jagoff, who always has the right words to convince me to give up on myself. To take it easy, relax, not stress mysel out over things, and just keep letgting things slide.

It even makesme feel good about it, like I am being smart and wise because I can elude the forces of “hassle” and remain in my self-indulgent hog wallow instead of doing something crazy like making my life amount to something.

Sometimes I fele like I don’t even exist because I leave so little of a mark on the world. My friends, both offline and on, would surely tell me that I do make a mark by being their friend and that they are glad to have me in their lives.

But people have a need to contribute to the community and be rewarded for it. It is not healthy for a human being to live without productive labour.

In fact, it is downright depressing.

Good thing I have Skyrim to treat the symptoms, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had a million great blog topic ideas earlier, can’t remember any of them now, so you nice people get treated to what happens when I freestyle is by directing my train of thought right onto the page and leaving you, the reader, awash in my stream of consciousness. up to your knees.

Hope youi brought your waders.

So let’s talk Trump. Specifically, how to deal with him.

Trump is a spoiled brat. And I know the cure for bratty children, and that is to ignore them when they are behaving badly and only pay attention to them when they are being good little boys and girls.

The basic brat modus operandi says “I can make you pay attention to me and make everything revolve around me by being bad!”

That is Trump’s formula and it’s working flawlessly. Like any brat, he knows exactly what to say to get him the attention he craves and that is practically his sole motivation for saying them : to make everything about him.

And lo and behold, he’s all people talk about. He dominates the news. The entire media pipeline is flooded with people talking about him. And he loves it.

Any brat would.

The cure, were this possible, would be for everyone to ignore him unless he is being good. People would have to break their Trump addiction and give up being constantly dazed and outraged by the brat’s latest outrage. That would risk actually waking up from your Trumped out state and realizing that you are part of the problem and doing your part to be part of the solution.

I do not know how one goes about convincing billions of people to kick a socially acceptable addiction, though.

After all, it’s fun. There is a reason that nothing goes viral like outrage and that’s because getting good and mad about stuff is very cathartic. You get to vent all your latent frustration and rage at a deserving target and there is no risk of there being any direct consequences in your personal life.

Surfely that’s worth letting a toddler have the nuclear codes, right?

I first noticed this phenomenon a long time ago, when Reader’s Digest added a feature called “That’s An Outrage!”.

This feature’s content was entirely made up of new stories that will piss you off.

And I had to ask myself why on Earth would someone want to read such a thing. In general, people do not actively seek out things that will make them angry. Anger is a response to danger, and inherent in that idea is the idea that danger is bad and to be avoided.

So for people to actively seek out anger is rather counterintuitive, to say the least.

Obviously people were getting something they wanted out of it. But what?

Thne I thought about my theories about where rage addiction comes from and I had my answer. People feel good when they are angry. The adrenaline makes you feel more alive and opens up your senses. you have a feeling of power and (potentially false) clarity, and the world seems crystal clear and easy to understand as a battle between us and the enemy.

This is, by the way, why right wing news outlets are constantly pushing the outrage button. Whether someone is stupid from age, upbringing, or genetics, the need for as many of those world-simplifying moments as possible in order to ease your fears about a world you fear and do not truly understand any more becomes an overwhelming necessity. To give it up would be to risk getting  lost in the complex world of nuanced thought, a world which the person has absolutely no faith in their ability to navigate, and having to admit to themselves that they are adults who have no idea what is really going on. And that thought, of course. is unacceptable.

There is no room for such an admission in modern democratic individualist societies. TO admit this would be to admit one has, in a sense, failed to reach adulthood. Inherent in democracy is the idea that everyone gets a say on what happens and therefore everyone’s opinion is treated equally.

This comes with it the obligation to make sense of the world in order to have some idea of what is going on and how the world works in order to make your opinion matter.

But what if you are simply not up to the task? What if, in any real and objective assessment, you are not capable of handling the complexities of modern life?

You certainly can’t admit it to yourself or anyone else. Nobody is ever going to say “I’m sorry, but I am too stupid to have an opinion on that” when a reporter talks to them on the street. That’s an unthinkable thought. The only people who might do that are people with cognitive handicaps who know they are stupid and deal with it all the time.

Otherwise, there is simply no way to birdge the gap. We liberals need to give up a small but vital piece of our well-intentioned egalitarianism and admit that some people are smarter than others and that one cannot create a world in which everyone is “enlightened” by our standards.

The idea that mean so much to us might well be too complex and uncertain for people who are not part of the naturally occurring intelligentsia. It might well be our obligation to simplify things for people in a way that we personally would find incredibly insulting.

And we have to do it without coming off as patronizing or lecturing or condemning.

And that involves doing what we find hardest : treating people who do not have out gifts as equals. Not just political or philosophical equals either.

We have to treat them like they are just as good as us. And that means getting rid of a whole lot of prejudices and assumptions about “that kind of person”.

Only then will we be able to connect with them and understand them and talk tp them on their level, in their language, addressing their concerns, and actually getting through to them for once.

Otherwise, we will remain villains in their eyes because they can sense liberal disdain for them and people naturally hate those who hate them.

To them, we represent every middle class person who has ever looked at them like they are a lower form of life they can barely tolerate and who acted like the world belonged to them and working class people should be glad we keep them around as cattle.

We nbeed to change that image in their minds.

We need to make friends with them. Go to their events. Soak up their culture. Become part of their communities, without judgment and without disdain.

Only then will they be willing to listen to us.

And I bet we will find out we’re not that different after all, and the divisions are made up bullshit that politicians use to keep us from uniting against our oppressors.

And only then can the healing truly begin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

These are my thoughts on the particularly grotesque pattern of (mostly) male misbehaviour that is making the news lately.

What on Earth prompts a man to expose himself to an underling or otherwise make crude sexual overtures to someone over whom he has power?

What are these men thinking?

I don’t have a single answer for these questions but I have some of the factors, like :

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.  Civilization only goes so far, and we have a number of instincts we do not acknoledge and ergo have no power over. One  of the strongest is the association of power with sex. There is some fundamental hardwired message in our brains that says “when you are the alpha, the people around you are your harem, to do with as you please”.

That’s the factor that lowers the barrier between horniness and this kind of behaviour. In the context of modern society, it seems insane that anyone would whip it out and give it a wiggle, and it is insane if you are not cognizant of this factor.

We are only a semi-monogamous species. We have pair bonding instincts that are very strong, but we also have the old primate-style hareming instincts waiting to kick in given the right circumstances.

And one of those circumstances is being the local alpha and having people of your preferred gender under you in the hierarchy plus time alone with them.

Familiarity breeds attempt. Another factor is that to the predator, these victims bypass all the usual meeting and social grooming anxiety that one experiences “out in the wild” in the world of dating and romance.

That makes this kind of thing especially attractive to insecure males who, in the world at large, have a lot of trouble approaching and meeting people. The dating world is a harsh jungle and a lot of thje time the insecure man feells like he is outcompeted before he even shows up to the party.

So to have someone you are attracted to so close at hand and not only super familiar to you but, due to the power difference, completely nonthreatening to you is just too much of a temptation for some people.

They like me! They really like me!.  This leads to one of the aspects of this phenomenon I find particularly disturbing : the clear duality in the minds of the predator as to what is going on.

To me, it is clear that in the predator’s mind, this is a normal dating situation in which they happen to be doing really, really well. On some level, they also know that it’s a power relationship as well. But they are clearly willing to suppress that thought in order to get their needs met.

And this is about far more than sex. It’s about ego, and fantasy fulfillment, and social damage repair, and confirmation of high status, and a million other needs.

Thus, the phenomenon tends to turn into a nightmarish parody of normal human dating and courtship behaviours. Gifts are bought, social grooming language is exchanged, intimacy is established through the exchange of personal histories.

It’s like this :

A is pointing a gun at B’s head.

A: TELL ME YOU LOVE ME OR I WILL BLOW YOUR FUCKING BRAINS OUT!
B : I… love you?
A believes them.

Or something like that.

Look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an out of context penis! There is clearly some kind of genital display urge in males. Whether it’s an unsolicited dick pic or a “dropping the towel” type incident or even the sex crime known as “flashing”, there is clearly some part of the male brain that makes some men feel the need to show their penis to people they find sexy as if this was a normal part of sexual behaviour.

One feminists author I read a long, long time ago suggested that this was because men expect other people to be as impressed by their penises as they are.

I won’t deny, that’s a factor.

But we must always remember that these men are under the influence of horniness, and hence probably not thinking things through that far.

I think the dominant factor is simply that in modern society, nudity is seen as sexual, and so, in a bizarre way, the out of context penis is a sexual overture.

One that cuts to the chase, as it were. To put it mildly.

To me, this kind of thinking is emblematic of how badly broken down the usual social limits are in the predator. There is no context in which this behaviour would actually result in sex.

Nobody in history has ever been presented with an out of context penis and said “Well when you put it THAT way, let’s fuck!”.

I mean, I am a very “lonely” gay man, and I still do not want some guy suddenly dropping trou and showing me his pride and joy. Um, no thank you. Put that thing away before you catch a cold.

That kind of thing wouldn’t even work at an orgy.

So clearly, this is a behaviour isolated from any sort of logical anticipation of desired result as well as being divorced from normal social context.

In fact, there is something disturbingly childlike to it.

It’s possible that this bizarre genital displau behaviour is also tied into the exertion of power and dominence. Forcing someone to tolerate behaviour that makes them uncomfortable or even disgusted is an exertion of power over them that some twisted individuals might even find erotic.

Like Jabba slobbering over Leia. It was the power he had over that he was getting off on, not the act itself.

To conclude (sorta), this entire behaviour pattern is a lot more complex than the black and white portrait of it seen in the media these days.

If any of this caused you to be horrified to discover yourself feeling more sympathetic to these predators, that was not my intention.

I merely describe the phenomenon.

Your conclusions are your own.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I could never leave YOU, Tom.

You’re just too damned sexy.

No idea what to talk about tonight and I only have an hour to put out my 1K of freestyle brain eejections, so get ready to put on your waders and join my stream of consciousness as I type whatever pops into my head.

had therapy today. It went fairly well. Ever since that session around a month or maybe six weeks ago where I let out my anger, bitterness, and frustration and, in doing so, revealed the real me that has always existed behind my world of smoke and mirrors,. I have been experiencing rapid recovery, and the sessions have improved.

I’d done such a bang up job of burying all that dark stuff about how nobody could help me because nobody could handle the real me that I’d forgotten it myself.

Or, if not exactly forgotten, agressively de-indexed. It’s the same thing I did with the memories of being raped when I was three years old. They were never erased, they were just pushes so far into the back of my mind that I couldn’t see them any more.

And when I did “remember”, it was like suddenly realizing that there’s a tiger in the room with you and it’s been there for a really long time.

And it wants to use the remote.

And the only reason you hadn’t noticed it before now was because. on a subconscious level, you trained yourself to never look in that direction.

No wonder it’s a tad peeved.

Anyhow, before I let yet another metaphor run away with me, my point was that when all those feelings of being impossible to help and my feelings that nobody was truly trustworthy or reliable and a lot of other negative Taurus bullshit (ha), it opened up a whole new horizen for me. I suddenly realized that I had been hiding my true self under a great deal of self-expression via performance for a really long time.

Like I built a mask, put it on, then forgot it was a mask and tried to be what it depicted.

And it’s all rooted in the angry and hopeless conclusions about the world I came to when I was an ignored, isolated, intellectual tried. A succession of negative experiences with people who didn’t give a shit about me and just said whatever it took to make me go away demonstrated to me that I was truly alone in the world.

My family didn’t want to hear my problems. They just wanted me to go away.

My fellow students wanted nothing to do with me. They just wanted me to go away.

The school admins and the teachers didn’t want to deal with me. They said go away.

But of course, as a kid, you can’t literally go away. You still need to have a home and a familly and a school and a community to support you. You’re still just a kid, no matter what kind of IQ you have.

So I went away by retreating into my mind so deep that I am still trying to excavate myself after all these years. I buried myself in books and TV and video games, which were nicely cerebral (in the sense of being experiences of the mind) and thus safe, and to this day, I have not come out again.

I try to dig upwards. It’s the best I can do. And I dream of standing in the light without shame or fear or the feeling of exposure.

But it’s slow going.

And in the meantime, I feel so very alone.

I know that’s the depression talking, but that makes no difference. I’m the Barnacled Hermit, a lonely robot with a busted antenna who thinks that nobody cares about him when many people do, he’s just not receiving the signals.

I have the advantage of knowing that the signals are there and not getting through, at least. And that gives me the faith I need to keep believing that there is something worth tunneling towards. I know people love me and value me and think I am something special and worthy and precious.

I just can’t feel it through all this goddamned ice.

And isolation eats away at you over time. I was talking with my therapist about this today. How isolation leads to social stimulation intolerance which leads to further isolation., Social stimuli that would seem mild or even nonexistant to healthy people turn into enormous stressful anxious situations.

Your mind then records that experience as a negative one and reinforces your aversion and you want nothing more than to make sure that never, ever happens again.

And you are willing to do whatever it takes – no matter how shortsightedly self-destrutive – in order to convince yourself that it never will happen again and thus calm yourself down from all the terror.

And as always, when I say “you”, I really mean “me”. I’m talking to myself.

When you are isolated from your fellow Earthlings… I mean, human beings.. .it’s easy to imagine that it is because of how awful you are. That’s the only way your social matrix can interpret the total lack of social reinforcement. That must mean we are bad people, otherwise why would our tribe reject us?

And down and down and down the spiral goes, till you have been in the dark for so long that you stop believing in light as something that can ever happen to you.

And you look at the real people living in the real world and wonder what

it’s like to be poart of a warm and engaged and vital world where people are interconnected via relationships and where they care for one another and look out for one another instead of leaving each other out in the cold, alone.

And I go around anf around trying to figure out how much of what I perceive is just the mirror image of my tainted soul and how much is real is that waggy thing a part of me?

I’ll bite it to see.

Nothing… guess I am not real after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

It’s going to be a social day.

Tonight, I will be going to a Stand Up For Mental Health graduation show in support of Felicity, who will be performing as an alumni.

Or is that alumnus?

And I am looking forward to it. I have been to these events before and I have always enjoyed them. Watching people with mental health issues stands in front of an audience, bold as brass, and tell us the jokes they have been working on for six months always makes me smile and there is a very positive vibe to the whole thing.

Plus, they are, in general, quite funny.

So I am really looking forward to the show.

And I am also dreading it.

Can’t be helped. It’s like this whenever I am going to leave the apartment and be social. It doesn’t matter that I know that I will enjoy myself once I am out there. It doesn’t matter that I know it will be good for me and I will feel better about myself afterwards. It doesn’t matter that I will be with my friends, who are the people I trust the most in the world.

I will experience panic and dread nevertheless, and will have to overcome myself multiple times in order to go out and have fun.

And let me tell you, you really get a feeling for your own insanity when you are struggling to convince yourself to do something you know you will enjoy.

It’s my depression that I am really wrestling with. The unhealthy part of my mind. It reacts to the prospect of a radical increase in social stimulation like someone was going to burst in the door and drag it into the cold harsh world, and all it wants to do is cling to its tiny comfort zone like a barnacle until the bad thing goes away.

And were I to succeed in evading the nightmarish horror of social exposure,  I would be “rewarded” for it with a massive sense of relief that would, in a “baby wallowing in it’s own filth” way, reinforce the behaviour.

That’s how it works, folks, and it ain’t pretty.

So each time I am going to go do something social, I have to pry that baby barnacle out of its comfy crevice and push it out into the harsh light of the sun. Even though I know for a fact I will enjoy myself, part of me will always feel like it’s being violated.

And let me tell you THIS, folks. You really, REALLY get a feeling of your own insanity when you feel and believe things you know are not true.

I still feel like nobody ever wants me around. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine someone actually wanting my company. I live with a constant fear and shame that is in no sense backed up by facts, but nevertheless persists. Even when I am having a lovely time out there in the world, the fear and shame is there, whispering thoughts of escape and concealment into my ear.

“Go home!” it says. “Run away and go home. Home is wonderful. Home is safe. Home is the best place in the world because home is the only place where you do not feel this fear and anxiety. Home is the only good place in the world. It would feel so good to have that feeling go away. So go! Go! GO! ”

That’s the struggle I face every day. It’s the force that forces me to isolate myself most of the time. It’s the gravity well I must generate the thrust to climb out of every single time I step out of this bedroom of mine.

Because I am ashamed to admit it, but there are times when even the prospect of encountering Joe and/or Julian fills me with irrational dread. Not because of anything to do with them whatsoever. They are, like I said, two of the three people I trust the most in this world. This has nothing to do with them.

And everything to do with me. My issues, my damage, my broken and spastic insufficiently elastic Mr. Fantastic brain.

That is the millstone around my neck that makes life hard for me. It is my burden, my baggage, my cross to bear.

And over the years, that millstone has gotten a whole lot lighter. I’ve let go of a lot of that god damned baggage and left large pieces of that cross by the wayside.

SO it no longer crushes me like it used to do. When my depression was at its worst, it was so heavy that it rendered me nearly immobile.

If it hadn’t been for the need to cash my welfare check and buy groceries, I would never have left my bachelor suite at all.

Even going to the communal bathroom was hard.

So I have come a long way since then. But my journey isn’t over yet.

In fact. in many ways I have been in decline since I graduated from VFS. I feel into a deep dark hole where I pushed the world away again now that there was no external force pushing me up again.

The Daily Uno gig at least preserved my self-worth by proving to me that my skills were worth something. But then that ended and I have had a hard time convincing myself to go onto UpWork and job hunt again.

It’s just so much easier to do my words every day and spend literally the rest of my waking hours playing Skyrim.

Skyrim makes the time pass smoothly and easily and allows me to escape the problem of what to do with myself as the hours stretch out to the distant horizon.

I know that I am addicted. I know this because I increasingly feel like my life is measured in Time Spent Feeling Safe Playing Skyrim, and Everything Else.

And the Everything Else could be 72 hours away and I would still be dreading it because that’s when I will have to stop playing Skyrim and go back into the real world where I have to work and function and cope.

Once I am there, it’s not so bad. It’s not as good as my Skyrim time, at least as my depression measures it, but it’s not so bad,

It’s the transition that really kills me.

It’s the transition that makes me hungry for more.

It’s the transition that lingers in my mind and makes me long to rush back into Skyrim’s warm and comforting embrace.

It’s the transition that is killing me.

It’s the transition that makes me a junkie.

It’s the transition that makes me want to die.

(I’m not suicidal, folks, just expressing a feeling. -Ed. )

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I had such ambitious plans.

I planned to take all of this quiet Saturday night to eat pizza, drink diet cola, and write stuff for my System universe. I was basically going to write till I dropped. No word limit, just writing and writing until I couldn’t write another word because I had used up all my brain calories and was running entirely off the backup battery supply.

We’ve all been there.

But life threw a monkey wrench into my plans by tking out my Internet connection.

And boom, just like that, I am cut off at the knees.

“But Fruvous…” you say in that cute sexy voice of yours. “You’re writing right now. Why couldn’t you have done the exact same thing but in OfficeLibre instead of a WordPress window?”
Good point, rhetorical device. Why not?

To understand why is to understand a lot about me.

The primary operating principle here is that I do not handle surprise well. This is a life long problem. When something totally unexpected like suddenly having no Internet (or is it internet now) happens, it throws me for a loop.

And it throws it HARD.

Not that I am helpless in the situation. Not like I used to be. When I was a sicker, weaker, less firmly bolted together person, I would not have been able to even think about the problem for hours. I would have buries myself in my distractions and when I finally could face the problem, I would do so in a very timid way, ready to leap back into my hole at the slightest sign of trouble.

That, to put it mildly, is no recipe for success.

These days, I am much stronger. These things still cut me off at the knees, metaphorically speaking, but I retain the ability to deal carefully and rationally with the situation by more or less taking my own hand and talking myself through it.

And I mean that. I talk to myself, in my head, in a calm and soothing and somewhat maternal voice that uses the third (?) person to engender intimacy.

“OK, well we can see that the Internet is out, but there’s no need to panic. Let’s see if…. “

It’s sort of a hybrid of how my mother talked to me when I was a preschooler and the sort of Robert Picardo as the EMH in full bedside manner mode I imagine Reg having.

Somewhat prim and precise, but also warm and caring, so I get a combination of the soothing nature of personal warmth and care, and the firm competence that reassures me that someone who knows what they are doing is now in charge.

But make no mistake… the time bomb of panic had been primed and is ready to explode.

I just have a much longer fuse, which stands a better chance of burning for long enough for me to get the problem solved in time.
To, in my signature style, over-extend the metaphor, the bomb still goes off. That can’t be stopped.

But hopefully, by then, it’s been handled by the bomb squad and is safely encased in concrete and steel and goes off harmlessly with a soft thud.

Not so tonight.

The panic set in almost immediately after I discovered that our Internet connection was deader than disco. I kept calm as I tried various things to see if I could solve the problem or, barring that, at least get some kind of precise diagnosis of the issue in order to soothe myself with information.

I’m the sort of person who would rather have a solid and precise but unpleasant fact than preserve hope by maintaining a tenuous and nebulous sense of hope.

Fuck fuzzy hope. I want hard data.

Adding to the disruption to my routine was the fact that I couldn’t order pizza like I usually do on Saturday because, like any social anxiety suffer, I order my Pizza Hut pizza online.

But then I remembered that we have a flier from Fresh Slice tacked to our notice board. So I retrived it, looked it over, decided I wanted an extra large Garlic Lovers Chicken Feast pizza, and braced myself for talking to a stranger before picking up the phone to make my order.

Only to find that the phone was dead.

Completely dead. No dial tone. No click sound when I toggled the receiver. Pressing the buttons did not produce any tones.

And my mind immediately leaps to those scenes in TV and movies where the person picks up the phone to call the cops on the killer and finds that the phone line has been cut.

Clearly, someone was hell bent on isolating me before going in for the kill.

Well OK, not really. But you have to admit, that was a crushing thing to happen to someone who was already upset about another disruption.

After all that, there was no way I could calm down and focus enough to write prose. So I blog instead.

At least I can still play Skyrim. If that was somehow cut off as well, I would really be at a loss as to what the fuck to do with myself.

I wouldn’t even have been able to go watch television because the reason (I eventually found out) I don’t have Internet right now is that we don’t have cable right now, and we get our Internet via our cable television provider.

Not that it would matter if we got it through Telus, because the phone is dead too.

So my plan now is to take a nap then play Skyrim all night Admittedly, that was the plan before the outage as well. The only difference is the wear and tear on my nerves and a loss of productivity.

I can’t let this writing energy fade away. I can’t slump back into formlessness and drift through life with my head in the sand again. The writing has made me feel more alive than I have in a very long time, and I can’t afford to let that go.

I want to shine, shine, shine for the world.

And you can’t do that and stay invisible at the same time.

Sooner or later, you have to uncloak.

Fire on that explosion!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.