I’ll just go, then

Actual blogging will commence shortly, but first, I have something to share.

This is how I just asked for RSVPs for the next FRED on the FRED Facebook group :

(To the tune of Manic Monday by the Bangles)

The 4th will be a FRED-ish Sunday
That’s our fun day
Our chat with everyone day 
Our burgers on a bun day
The 4th will be a FRED-ish Sunday!

So who’s going to be there?

I feel compelled to share that with you because not only I am inordinately pleased at my own cleverness and whimsical charm, but I just spent twenty minutes working on the dang thing and I think that should count.

Anyhow. On with the blogging. Ahem.

(TRIGGER WARNING : I will be touching on the subject of suicide today.)

Nobody ever actually wants me around.

That’s what my depression tells me. Despite buckets of evidence that the exact opposite is true, the feeling persists, and it persists because it was installed when I was a very young child and that kind of thing is not easy to overcome.

Thus, it is an example of true madness because it is a thing I know not to be true but cannot help but believe.

So much for the supremacy of the rational mind. Oh well, I never truly believed in it anyway. Not as such. There have been times when it felt like I was a mighty wizard in total control of my mental domain and capable of feats of astrounding power and subtlety and wisdom.

But that’s always been bullshit.  The truth is that there are parts of my mind, the parts I call the dark forest, that cannot be touched by even my mightiest of magics, and I am therefore a slave to their irrationality.

I believe false things. It hurts my rugged philosopher’s pride to admit it, but it’s true. I used to think that was impossible – that it was impossible to know a thing is false but believe it anyway.

But that was the arrogance of the conscious mind talking. It presupposes that there is no belief which is not based on reason and thus subject to reason,.

Bullshit. People believe things for a lot of reasons and most of them are not positions derived from reasoned thought.

Instead, they are,., god damn it, I have wandered way off point into intellectualization once again. Oh well, at least I am beginning to catch myself at it.

Back to the point. I have this deep feeling that people are barely tolerating me and that stems from my childhood and leads to me feeling like I am a horrible, horrible thing, less than human and way, way less than worthless. That I am a liability to the world and a bane to all who know me and the world would be better off without me in it.

That’s where the suicidal thoughts come in. I am a long way down the road of recovery from actually believing that to be true, but the feeling remains.

The feeling runs so deep that at one point, it even informed the severe hygiene issues I had when my depression was very bad. I figured I was so inherently repulsive and that nobody could ever like or love me so what was the point of showers and such?

People would hate me anyway. I’d still be inherently deeply repulsive to them. At least if I smelled bad, they would have a reason other than my deep down revolting self.

That’s something I truly believed at the time. There’s no such thing as a clean turd, I said. No matter how hard you scrub, it’s still shit.

Crazy, I know. That’s some highly diseased reasoning there. But it matched how I felt about myself and I was too depressed to care so I kept believing it.

I’m feeling much better now. I still struggle with the motivation to look after myself sometimes and I have days when I can’t stand the thought of dealing with myself on any level because I am so goddamned sick of myself.

But most of the time, I keep it together. I still don’t shower every day – that is beyond my reach right now.

But I shower four or five times a week, so I’m am not far from there.

As for the feeling that nobody ever wants me around, I am on the plus side of a stalemate with it. I correct the thoughts when they pop up and I push back against the feeling whenever I can.

But it’s still the size of an elephant and as hard as it is to stop an elephant, it is still far harder to get it to go in the opposite direction.

I suppose what I really need is strongly positive social input. Something to override those harsh and toxic early lessons and reach that child crying in the cold inside me and show him that there is light and warmth and hope after all.

But it would have to be really strong because I am so delicate and damaged all throughout that part of my psyche that it’s very hard for anything to get through. People can tell me nice things about myself and treat me well but all that positive energy gets blocked by my anxiety and tension in social situations, not to mention that toxic swamp of self-loathing that lies ready to swallow up any positive feelings.

Maybe I’m too scared for hope. Maybe I am too scared to let the love and warmth of the world in because deep down, I feel like the second I do that, life will crush me heart so bad that there will be notghing left of me any more.

Like I’m a lab mouse who has received a painful electric shock the last 100 times they reached for the cheese and now won’t even look in its direction no matter how safe it might seem or how good it smells.

The risk is just too great.

I’d rather starve.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

Letting go and picking up

ht, as a jumping off point [1], I will start me issues with letting go of things.

For example : I was just playing Skyrim. Quelle surprise. But I had to stop in order to fix myself some food[2] and then get my sweet fat ass to bloggin’.

And I didn’t want to stop. It took a non-trivial act of will to make myself do it. I didn’t want to change gears, and when I made myself do it, part of me viewed it as being ripped from a nice warm happy room and thrown into the icy dark outside.

All this from just stopping playing a video game.

But it’s not just Skyrim. Whatever I am doing, I will react to change in mode the exact same way. For instance, when I finish tomight’s post. I will step away from the computer and take a nap. [3]

And that very same part of me will view that like I am being from my womb untimely rip’d. It’s like there is always the part of me that can’t accept a justified change of gears and that’s the part of me that adds drag to my every action, weighing me down in every single thing I do that is significantly different than what I am doing.

That part of me is never, ever ready for change. Any change, no matter how good. It could be a change from waiting for a bus to having amazing sex and it wouldn’t matter. Part of me would still be wishing I was still at that bus stop and not in this new situation where everything is different and weird.

And I wasn’t always like this. I clearly remember having the simple instincts that regulated my activities, the primary one simple being getting tired of what I was doing and deciding to do something else.

That doesn’t happen any more. I don’t get tired of playing Skyrim. I learned that when I first had my tragic and precipitous plunge into addiction. I played (and played with) Skyrim for every waking hour of the day, not even eating and barely sleeping.

And the thing is, I didn’t feel bad, exactly. Not the way you would think completely neglecting oneself like that would hurt. The hot circuit between me and the game pushed all the usual sensations like hunger and thirst to the periphery of my consciousness. And, I reasoned falsely, if I don’t feel bad then everything must be okay.

In a way, it’s shocking that our minds are even capable of that.

Anyhow, back to the point. I can feel how wrong my mental situation is. It’s not normal to spend most of your waking hours playing a video game. And it’s not just abormal, it’s unhealthy. Life is meant to contain more ingredients than that.

And yet, I remain addicted. Healthy or not, when I am playing Skyrim, I am happy. Against that no logical and/or sensible argument can prevail. I have, at my mouse-clicking fingertips, an unlimited supply of a stimulus that can keep me sufficiently absorbed that there are no mental CPU cycles left for being depressed or anxious or picking myself apart.

All my demons are too busy with the game to harm me.

That’s my kind of religion.

And unlike other addictions, it has no self-regulating limitations. Whether you are addicted to crack cocaine, gooey desserts, or long distance running, there is only so much of it you can do before physical limits kick in.

Plus, in the case of substances, you only have so much of them, Once you finish that, that’s it, you are out of it, and so the experience limits itself that way.

Not so with Skyrim. No matter how much I play, I will never run out. EVen when I exhaust every single aspect of the game that I currently have at my disposal, with a few minutes work I can download entirely new things that revitalize the game and suddenly it’s a whole new toy.

I’ve been slowly trying to pull myself away from it ever since I fell into that deep dark hole, and I feel like I am making progress but only peripherally.

I have not come anywhere near confronting the addiction itself. That will only happen when I have the strength to choose to do other things with my free time. Things that cannot help but seem pale and dull and onerous compared to my beloved Skyrim.

Hmmm. I set out to talk about my problem with letting go, didn’t I? Oh well. [1]

It is the nature of addictions that they make it nearly impossible to believe that anything in the woirld can be as good as the object of the addiction.

That’s the point of my obesity related question, “If you could take a pill that made it so you would get everything you get out of food now but from half the amount of food, would you take it?”

Clearly, the logical answer is yes. After all, it is one heck of a good deal. You would lose weight without sacrificing anything at all.

What a bargain!

And yet, for an obese person, the instinct is to say no. Why? Because we cannot believe that we could ever be happy with less, even when it is stipulated as part of the hypothetical. It’s an unthinkable thought, an unbelievable belief.

The addiction can only see less food as deprival, no matter what else is said.

And that’s how I feel about Skyrim. Intellectually, I know that there was life before Skyrim and in said life I did many things with my day and enjoyed them all.

But I can’t relate to that any more.

For me, there is just Skyrim and the void.

And the void left town.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Note my being realistic about how likely I am to stick to one subject. Thanks, you’re right, that really is awesome of me. Thank you.
  2. Becauser seriously, who’d eat broken food?
  3. Totally necessary because writing uses up my brain calories and if I was to try to go back to playing Skyrim, I would not have sufficient wherewithal to enjoy iy.
  4. ht, as a jumping off point [1], I will start me issues with letting go of things.

    For example : I was just playing Skyrim. Quelle surprise. But I had to stop in order to fix myself some food[2] and then get my sweet fat ass to bloggin’.

    And I didn’t want to stop. It took a non-trivial act of will to make myself do it. I didn’t want to change gears, and when I made myself do it, part of me viewed it as being ripped from a nice warm happy room and thrown into the icy dark outside.

    All this from just stopping playing a video game.

    But it’s not just Skyrim. Whatever I am doing, I will react to change in mode the exact same way. For instance, when I finish tomight’s post. I will step away from the computer and take a nap. [3]

    And that very same part of me will view that like I am being from my womb untimely rip’d. It’s like there is always the part of me that can’t accept a justified change of gears and that’s the part of me that adds drag to my every action, weighing me down in every single thing I do that is significantly different than what I am doing.

    That part of me is never, ever ready for change. Any change, no matter how good. It could be a change from waiting for a bus to having amazing sex and it wouldn’t matter. Part of me would still be wishing I was still at that bus stop and not in this new situation where everything is different and weird.

    And I wasn’t always like this. I clearly remember having the simple instincts that regulated my activities, the primary one simple being getting tired of what I was doing and deciding to do something else.

    That doesn’t happen any more. I don’t get tired of playing Skyrim. I learned that when I first had my tragic and precipitous plunge into addiction. I played (and played with) Skyrim for every waking hour of the day, not even eating and barely sleeping.

    And the thing is, I didn’t feel bad, exactly. Not the way you would think completely neglecting oneself like that would hurt. The hot circuit between me and the game pushed all the usual sensations like hunger and thirst to the periphery of my consciousness. And, I reasoned falsely, if I don’t feel bad then everything must be okay.

    In a way, it’s shocking that our minds are even capable of that.

    Anyhow, back to the point. I can feel how wrong my mental situation is. It’s not normal to spend most of your waking hours playing a video game. And it’s not just abormal, it’s unhealthy. Life is meant to contain more ingredients than that.

    And yet, I remain addicted. Healthy or not, when I am playing Skyrim, I am happy. Against that no logical and/or sensible argument can prevail. I have, at my mouse-clicking fingertips, an unlimited supply of a stimulus that can keep me sufficiently absorbed that there are no mental CPU cycles left for being depressed or anxious or picking myself apart.

    All my demons are too busy with the game to harm me.

    That’s my kind of religion.

    And unlike other addictions, it has no self-regulating limitations. Whether you are addicted to crack cocaine, gooey desserts, or long distance running, there is only so much of it you can do before physical limits kick in.

    Plus, in the case of substances, you only have so much of them, Once you finish that, that’s it, you are out of it, and so the experience limits itself that way.

    Not so with Skyrim. No matter how much I play, I will never run out. EVen when I exhaust every single aspect of the game that I currently have at my disposal, with a few minutes work I can download entirely new things that revitalize the game and suddenly it’s a whole new toy.

    I’ve been slowly trying to pull myself away from it ever since I fell into that deep dark hole, and I feel like I am making progress but only peripherally.

    I have not come anywhere near confronting the addiction itself. That will only happen when I have the strength to choose to do other things with my free time. Things that cannot help but seem pale and dull and onerous compared to my beloved Skyrim.

    Hmmm. I set out to talk about my problem with letting go, didn’t I? Oh well. [1]

    It is the nature of addictions that they make it nearly impossible to believe that anything in the woirld can be as good as the object of the addiction.

    That’s the point of my obesity related question, “If you could take a pill that made it so you would get everything you get out of food now but from half the amount of food, would you take it?”

    Clearly, the logical answer is yes. After all, it is one heck of a good deal. You would lose weight without sacrificing anything at all.

    What a bargain!

    And yet, for an obese person, the instinct is to say no. Why? Because we cannot believe that we could ever be happy with less, even when it is stipulated as part of the hypothetical. It’s an unthinkable thought, an unbelievable belief.

    The addiction can only see less food as deprival, no matter what else is said.

    And that’s how I feel about Skyrim. Intellectually, I know that there was life before Skyrim and in said life I did many things with my day and enjoyed them all.

    But I can’t relate to that any more.

    For me, there is just Skyrim and the void.

    And the void left town.

    I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not that I’m bitter

Whoever first said “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood” had no idea what the fuck they were talking about.

I mean, here I am, 44 years old, and only now full coming to grips with the fact that I didn’t just have a lousy childhood, I just plain didn’t have a childhood.

Not in a literal biological sense. obviously. On the physical level I have obviously completed my larval stage.

But psychologically, and especially socially,. I did not have a childhood at all. For most of it I did not have friends. When I had friends, they weren’t good ones.  I passed none of the usual milestones. No first kiss, first date, first sex, driver’s license, or any of the other things that not only mark someone’s development but are part of it, and without these events, the development does not happen.

I went to school,. came home, and became absorbed in my distractions – TV, books, video came – until it was time to go to bed.

Then I woke up the next day and did it all again. Every day. For all the time I was in school. It was all I knew. And it’s still all I know.

Nobody gave a damn about me. Least of all me. Nobody was paying attention. There was nobody to kiss it better if I fell. There was nobody looking after me to make sure I did not get hurt. There was nobody to teach me or guide me in how to live a life.

And the thing is, when there is nobody watching over you to keep you from harm, and you are all too aware of how incomplete your understanding of the world is,. and bad things keep hapopening to you and you don’t know why and nobody seems to be interested in stopping them, all you can do is become extremely averse to risk.

That’s what happenes to any animal that is exposed to random negative stimuli. At first they try to avoid the pain, But there’s no pattern. So they despair.

That’s why I build such thick walls between me and the outside world – unaware that I was also keeping the good stuff from getting in. My life became one based entirely around the consumption of media (and food) – so much the food).

And this was not without its benefits. I learned a lot,. processed a lot, gained an understanding of the world better that most adults had. With all that boredom in school, I have a lot of time to think, and that made me quite thoughtful.

After all, just sitting there thinking about things is an activity that requires no equipment, no external validation, no partner, and can be done at any time and at any place. All it requires is time (and space) to think.

It was the perfect activity for an extremely timid but highly intelligent child.

And the best part is that when you are really deep in thought, the real world fades away and so the fear that cuts you and guts you on a 24/7 basis abtes to the point where you are almost sane for a while.

Same thing with all that media consumption.

But no matter how smart you are or how wise and deep you get, you are still a human being with human needs, and mine were not met or even considered. It’s not just that nobody cared. It’s that nobody paid enough attention to me to even be apathetic.

You have to exist in people’s minds in order for them to not care about you.

I mean, you wouldn’t say that someone is apathetic towards some Tibetan kid in tonsure and saffron climbing a mountain peak and trying to remember all the religious lessons he has learned.

You’d say they didn’t even know he existed. And you’d be right.

And that’s how it was for me as a kid. I was less substantial than the shadow of a ghost. People knew I existed, in the same way they knew about starving kids in Africa, but like with those kids, they preferred not to think about me and I was not about to force them to do so,

I was far too timid for that.

So I disappeared. I became invisible. It was clear that I was not supposed to be here and that the best thing I could do was to exist as little as possible in order to place the least burden on my very reluctant hosts.

And that’s still how I feel today. Despite all evidence, most of the time I feel like I am an inexcusable liability that has no right to even exist and who can expect nothing more in life than to be a highly resented burden on others who only deal with mne at all out of guilt and who really wish I would just go off and die somewhere so they would not be stuck with me any more.

I know that isn’t true. But it’s how I feel anyhow. That’s why I had to create this alternate identtiy for myself online just to be able to feel comfortable amongst others.

Fruvous doesn’t have all my social damage. Through him, I can express everything that my damaged real self cannot. Things like my flamboyance,,my vibrant personality, my sexual self, my charisma, my charm, my wit, and my warmth, without my timid traumatized real self to hold him back.

Like I have said many times before, he is my ideal self. If I could learn to be like him in the real world, I would consider myself to have achieved transcendence.

But the icy cold grip of fear holds me back.

Anddespite what I sometimes find myself thinking,  I can’t just shrug it off with some kind of massive act of will.

That may come some day, but not until I thaw out and revive.

Writing blog posts like this is part of that process.

And I thank you. all my wonderful readers, for making it all possible.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

.

Chili for breakfast

I’ll get to the chili thing in a moment, but first, an update :

I got all the lich stuff working eventually. It took a lot of fiddling and trying things and trsting things and dealing with every new way the universe concocted to fuck meover just when I thought I had it fixed[1] and driving myself into a near fanatical frame of mind, but I made the god damned thing do what it was supposed to do.

I would like to say that I was overjoyed at my definitive triumph, but I wasn’t. At best, I felt a grim satisfaction and relief that I could finally relax.

But joy? Victory? Jubilation? Nope.

Part of my diseased mental state, I guess. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. Past a certain point, the stress and strain the stalwart striving poisons the pond of my emotional state and makes it so that joy and triumph are simply not possibilities any more.

GRim determination has seen me through to triumph but at a loiss.

I don’t know what the dividing line might be between happy victory and grim satisfaction. I suspect it is neurochemical in nature. At some point, my brain runs out of serotonin or dopamine and has to switch to a different mode in order to keep going.

And I always keep going.

And it does make me wonder what the hell is wrong with me, and wish there was some way to reset my entire body and mind so I can restore it back to its factory defaults and do my best to do better this time.

Had chili for breakfast this morning. Breakfast, in my case, being the meal I eat right before I go to sleep for the night, or rather, the morning.

I’ve managed to make it to bed earlier a few times lately. Like, at 3 am instead of 9 am. And the first time I did it, I woke up feeling great. Waaaay better than usual. And I thought, so that’s the secret.

But no, of course not. It didn’t really make much of a difference the other times. Maybe it is better in some way, maybe not.

I will try to go back to it soon and continue the experiment.

Last night and the night before I ended up doing something kind of random and nuts. I went to my room at the usual time, but instead of sitting down at the computer, I took a nap. Slept for a couple of hours, then got up and had my pitched battle with Skyrim and liches and everything that is wrong with the world today.

My world, anyway.

Then I had my main sleep – defined as the one that follows taking my sleeping pill – at around 9 am, woke up at 11:45 am, played Skyrim for a while, then pulled my lunch together and sat down to type for all you nice people.

Dunno if the nap improved my sleep or made it worse or what. I know that I am not done sleeping today. I need more. I can feel it. Even though I am not particularly sleepy right now,. I know that I will be when I stop typing and eating, and I am probably going to sleep throughout a large portion of this afternoon.

Not sure if eating while blogging is a good thing or not. On the one hand, it means I am eating during a state of higher activation and agitation than usual,and that can be quite bad for my delicate digestion.

On the other hand, it slows me down and keeps me from wolfing (or rather, foxing) down my food, and that’s definitely a good thing.

The two probably cancel each other out.

Anyhow, that pre-sleep meal of chili was mighty tasty. But also depressing because it reminded me how my tastes are getting blander by the minute.

I mean, this is just your perfectly normal can of Stagg chili we are talking about here. And yet, to eat it, I have to prepare like I am eating fuckin’ ghost peppers or something.

I have to have ice water, celery, garlic toast, and an apple handy so that I have plenty of things to counter the hotness of the chili in between bites.

And that’s just too much. I used to be able to eat that stuff and the worst that happened was that I would sweat a little. Now, it’s a whole operation.

I hate it. Like I have said before, the single most depressing thing to me about getting older is the blandening of my palate. I just can’t accept it. I just know I am going to be one of those lunatic old guys who keep on eating things they know damned well they are too old to eat because they are far too stubborn to admit to themselves that they can’t handle it any more.

I mean, it’s not like I was ever into super spicy food. But I could handle the usual consumer level of spiciness in foods like chili and tacos and curries without a problem.

And I just can’t accept that things have changed. There is something so fundamentally offensive to me about the idea that I have to eat blander food now that my mind rebels against the thought.

I guess we all have limits as to how sensible we can be.

Eating spicy foods right before you eat is probably a bad idea too. If I was a character in an old timy cartoon, it would have led to me going on some kind of psychedlic nightmare journey, probably involving the devil, long legged busty women, and movie stars that nobody remembers any more.

No such luck. That might have been a lot of fun. I’d enjoy my nightmares a lot more if they were animated.

No pac-man eyes, tho. Those creep me out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. “Oh, you can turn into a lich just fine… but now the game crashes when you try to open your inventory! Mua ha ha ha!”

The lich glitch

I’m going to talk Skyrim for a bit, but don’t worry, I was do my best to keep thoings general enough for non-players to understrand.

So for a long time, I have wanted to complete this addon for Skyrim called Undeath. It’s a very tough and challenging quest and previous attempts have met with frustration and just plain giving up.

But this time I had a plan. And after many, many hours of gameplay, involving a great deal of effort and a lot of thought, and just a teeny bit of cheating right at the end, I finally did it. My character died and then was reborn as a lich.

A lich, for those of you who have never played D&D, is a powerful undead mage. Picture a zombie wizard and you are fairly close. From all I can see, being a lich is everything I wanted it to be, complete with my character floating above the ground like an apparition, exactly as I have been picturing it in my mind since way before I ever heard of this addon.

And today, I finally made it. Performed the ritual, died, and rose again as the sort of creature that makes the gods themselves consider changing their plans.

But there was one teeny tiny problem.

My character keeps falling through the floor.

Not to the point where I fall to the center of the world, so to speak, but just enough so that my character isn’t even with the doors any more and therefore can’t go through them at all.

And not being able to go through doors is kind of a huge handicap for a character.  Doors are rather important. Both our world and Skyrim have a heck of a lot of them.

The gloitch also messes with the graphics so that I can see the seams in the backgrounds and cracks in the walls and so on.

So even if I decided to lead a door free lifestyle, it would still look like ass.

And it’s so goddamned frustrating because I am achingly close to my goal. It’s like a kid being stuck in the parking lot of Disneyworld. What I want so bad is just barely out of reach and it is stressing me the fuck out.

And don’t tell me “it’s just a video game”. This is my life, or at least, what passes for it.

And of course, I have wrestled with Google trying to find a solution, but of course, this is a problem unknown to the mind of man and so there is no fucking help THERE.

I swear, something about me and technology makes it so that when it breaks, it does so in the most bizarre, unheard-of way possible so that whoever I get to help me fix it stares at the problem with slack-jawed disbelief and says “I’ve never seen this kind of problem before. What did you DO?”.

That’s why I think I would be a whiz-bang product tester. All I would have to do is try to use the product and the combination of my strange luck, my tendency towards being easily confused by instructions, and my general cluelessness, it would not be long before I had accidentally found a dozen problems that are so gobsmackingly weird that it defies the laws of physics.

Lab Guy : Just play around with it for a little while, Mister Bertrand, and tell us what you think of our new product.

Me : Sure thing, no problem.

Lab Guy leaves. Five minutes later, he hears a strange otherwordly humming followed by a wet bang. He rushes to my cubicle.

There, he finds me looking hopeless and hapless and vaguely guilty, with the product in jagged and irregular pieces in front of me. It’s coating in a thick red substance/

Lab Guy : Oh my god. What did you DO?

Me : I just used it!

Lab Guy : What the fuck… how did you even…. holy shit, is that JAM? Where the hell did that even come from? How is this even possible?

Cut to a newsreader announcing a product recall due to “problems that might lead ro product failure and/or violating the tissue thin wall between realities. “

I should make sure my siblings read that. They would recognize the situation instantly.

SO I will continue to fiddle with my Skyrim in order to make that fucking lich thing work. I have come too far to give up now. I may even go as far as to disable every single other mod I have except for the really vital ones and see if that fixes it.

And I have to admit, the whole thing makes me kind of regret moving back to the original Skyrim. Somehow, in the wave of horniness/nostalgia that made me go back to the original, I had forgotten how fucking buggy the original is when you are using a lot of mods and how frustrated I used ot get trying to make things FUCKING WORK.

Special Edition has its problems too. It was, in fact, my inability to make sexytimes fun stuff work in Special Edition that sent me back to the original game.

But now I am thinking that the sexy stuff is highly overrated and I wish I had just endured the lack of it and stuck with Special Edition because it worked, on the whole, a heck of a lot better.

Or maybe that’s just nostalgia talking too.

All I know is that this is way more stress than should ever come from a video game. I am not too upset about that because, frankly, I could due with some stress in my life to give me a sense of struggle and movement.

Lack of stress can be very stressful. It’s like our boduies refuse to believe that there are no predators stalking us and so it tenses for confrontations that never happen.

At least, that’s how it works with us white people.

I really hope other sub-breeds of humans do better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Almost but not quite

I was going to write a story here, a fun little political romp, but the ideas are not quite forming right now, so it will have to wait.

Basically, the premise is “Fox News the morning after Donald Trump reveals himself to be the Antichrist on live national TV”.

Picture the Toddler in Chief giving a rambling and incoherent public statement suddenly saying “Oh, and just one more thing… ” then taking out a scary looking sacrificial knife with glowing runes carved on it and stabbing it into his forehead. That begins the process of him shedding his human skin, which falls off and burns, and now he stands before the world in his true form, which is a nine foot tall naked demon with screaming souls embedded in its flesh and a big ol satanic wang hanging out.

Why? Because it’s my story, damn it, and I am one lonely fag. Plus, honestly, it would make sense.  Like the spawn of Satan is going to worry about the freaking FCC and our absurd sense of “modesty”.

Also, to me, it makes the whole thing funnier. Your mileage may vary.

Anyhow, demonic Trump anounces that he is the Antichrist and that by electing and accepting and defending him as President, every Republican who voted for him has marked themselves as his slave and his property and will be devoured by him and shat out into Hell.

Because I’m not just lonely, I am one seriously twisted individual.

Then, of of course, we reverse angle to Fox News and a stunned Fox and Friends at a loss for a reaction.

Then someone says “I just want to point out that the never, not once, said he was NOT the Antichrist. But I bet you won’t hear THAT on the lame stream media!”.

Then somkeone replies, “You’re right, you won’t. In fact, I bet the liberal media will find some way to spin this as a bad thing. ”

And that’s where I run out of ideas.

I am sure I will come up with more eventually. But I wanted to get the ideas I had out of my head to clear way for the solution.

I’m in such turmoil lately. Large things are happening, or at least trying to happen, in my emotional landscape, and all I can do is stay out of the way like someone in Godzilla movie and wait for the giant monsters to sort out their differences.

Clearly my imagination is working fine on some level, at least.

I feel like I am (gross image alert) ready to secrete my poisons and spit them out into the world. To birth my pain once and for all and lay it out there for the world to see in all its ugliness and horror.

Well, better out than in.

What got me thinking along these lines was me looking around my room and pondering doing a major cleanup and imagining the place spotless.

And as usually happens with thoughts along those lines, a strange and disturbing feeling welled up inside me. A horrible feeling, like I am about to throw up or become incontinent or something. Like someone terrible inside me is going to rise up and come out and destroy me in the process, and it would be the most shameful thing possible.

Kind of like Trump shedding his skin, come to think of it.

Now, this is a strange thing to feel when contemplating something as simple and pleasant as a clean room. And it’s come up before when thinking about spotlessly clean environments, especially ones that are also very uncluttered, minimalist, bare, and visually very cold.

I giess that sort of thing triggers some very, very deep part of my brain that this imaginary environment to me is like a fire hydrant to a dog and therefore this is the place to offload waste.

And what is remarkable is the utter horror with which this prospect fills me. And yet, viewed abstractly, and grossness aside, it would be a good thing.

After all, I would be ridding myself of something truly awful. I would presumably feel a hell of a lot better afterward, and be better off for it.

So clearly this… substances, shall we say, represents something I have been holding inside me at all costs for a very long time. I can feel the tension in my soul of holding it in and how it has own grown more toxic and nasty over the years.

I am not quite sure what it’s made of, but if I had to guess, it would be shame, The sort of shame that comes from having been sexually violated at such an early age. The feeling that I am irrevocably dirty, disgusting, and awful (common in sexual assaulyt victims) and that if people knew what septic sewage I was inside, they would be so disgusted and horrified by me that they would reject me so hard that I would want to die because now I will never be able to fool anyone into loving me ever again.

Or something like that.

But, and I swear I am workinjg hard to keep the bathroom aspects of this as oblique as I can, but you can’t go forever without voiding waste. The waste would build up inside you and poison you and more and more space would be taken up by it and it would push against your organs and get more and more toxic till your entire emotional metabolism was dedicated to one thing and one thing only : containment.

And all because you couldn’t let go.

And truth be told, there is a lot that I have been holding inside for a long time. Far more than I am even aware of. And it is increasingly obvious to me that if I am to get well, somehow or another, I have to get all that stuff out of me.

But I am so afraid. And not just because I fear people will reject me.

Because I don’t want to come face to face with my foul and dirty shame.

Something like that could destroy a guy.

Worse, it might turn him into something he doesn’t even recognize.

And that would be a hell of a lot like death.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

The sun shall rise

Amazing what no longer being in financial stress can do for one’s mood. I feel WAY better now that I have cashed my monthly chequen and NOT had three hundred dollars of it immediately vanish.

That’s what happened last month, and it was a cruel and bitter shock. I think that contributed heavily to my bouts of depression this last month. I am the sort of person for whom financial security and emotion security go hand and hand, and having $300 vanish right before a five week month was a terrible, terrible blow to me.

And then it happened again when I cashed my GST cheque! The very GST cheque I was counting on to pay for my fifth week! Somehow, I had racked up another $70 in overdraft, and so boom, now my $110 GST cheque was $40 cash.

This shit is VERY bad for my health. No wonder I felt so bad.

The fact that this whole thing decimated my savings only made it still worse. Those savings were my bulwark against reality. And I had plans for them, more or less.

I know I said I had no idea what to do with the money. And that’s sort of true. But that doesn’t mean plans were not slowly forming in my mind that would have eventually lead to my having a clear idea what I wanted to do with it.

In fact, when I think of when I said, in this space, that it doesn’t matter because I had no idea what I wanted to do with it anyway, I kind of hate that guy for saying it.

Of course it matters, because oit’s my goddamned money!

DO NOT GET BETWEEN A TAURUS AND HIS MONEY.

Or bad thing can happen.

The good news is that I know it won’t happen again because I have completed the form for cessation of payments and this morning I got conformation that my application was successful and that I won’t have to worry about payments till the end of April.

So I have breathing space. Phew.

Ironically, I also got a phone call from the people working for the student loan people this morning who had apparently not heard about the cessation of payments thing.

No big deal. These things happen.

But when I was on the line with the student loan people, I asked about maybe getting that money back, and the person on the line told me that because the payment had been flagged as NSF, insufficient funds, it never happened and there was no need to return the payment.

But later, as I am waiting in line to cashez la cheque, it dawn on me that this made no fucking sense. If the transation had not gone through, I would not have been overdrawn, and that money wou;ld not have vanished when I cashed my check.

The transaction definitely went through. The student loan people got their money. Vancity (my bank) paid them the money. That’s why I was overdrawn.

And that’s where my goddamned money went.

Now I have no idea if it is possible for my to get my money back. I suspect it is not. I imagine that the student loan people are like Ferengi and never, ever, EVER give the money back, period.

But I will do what I can. It would do me a world of good to have the cash back and therefore not carry that guilt of having broken open the piggybank and let myself be financially violated any more.

Had a good session today. A lot of ground covered. I think I have found the right mode for me for therapy, which is intellectual but vulnerable. I was diving directly for the dirt today, but still within the comfort zone of intellectual type discourse.

As a result, I came away with the realization that if I need a model for the inner parent I want to be for my poor abused inner child, I need only look at the two people who were able to handle me : my babysitter Betty, and my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Rogers.

My babysitter Betty was a tough girl from the other side of the tracks, but also very sweet and caring, and she was not inclined to put up with any crap from me.

I mean, the very first thing I remember of her was her telling me that if I wanted my honey sandwiches with the crusts cut off, I could cut them off myself.

I obviously didn’t appreciate that at the time, but looking back, I am so glad I had someone like that in my life. Someone who pushed back. Someone who was not overwhelmed by me. Someone who, when necessary, put me in my place.

Someone who kept paying attention to me even when it wasn’t easy.

I got the same thing from Mrs. Rogers, although from an entirely different angle. She was an old-fashioned schoolmarm type who was the exact opposite of the 70’s ideal of the happy sunshine teacher who is every kids’ friend.

Those people were not what I needed. Those were the people who were baffled, confused, and overwhelmed by me, and therefore chose not to deal with me at all if they could help it.

And they could help it. Why? Because all it took was a little rejection and I went away.

I wouldn’t even complain.

Mrs. Rogers never tried to be your friend. She was your teacher, period, and you knew it. She was strict in tone and manner – I don’t think I ever saw her smile. And it was clear with her that if you wanted to relax in class, you had to earn it by behaving yourself.

Most kids hated her. I loved her. She knew how bright I was and she was not impressed. She doggedly dealt with me no matter how cluelessly obnoxious I was, and never gave up on me even though I could be quite trying at times.

I never got that at home.

And so now I have some idea of how to parent myself. What I need is an inner parent who is tough and strong-willed enough to push through all that fog in my mind and reach me in the funny little world I call home. Someone who sticks with me no matter what, and doesn’t let me get away with any bullshit.

But not because they hate me.

Because they love me and want me to thrive.

I never got that in my choldhood and it’s a tad late to get it from anyone else at the age of 44. So I will have to do it myself.

At least now, I have a place to start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

The crisis is coming

And that’s a good thing. Potentially a VERY good thing.

Like I have said before, I am not a transformative type person. I just keep plodding on without ever stopping for maintenance or fuel. I’d be a lot better off if I broke down and had to be towed to somewhere where I could get the care I need, but I just keep going.

Therefore, it takes some kind of crisis to get me to transform into my new, healthier shape. Metamorphosis might be the better word. Like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, it’s a way of changing into something new that can do the next thing.

I have been thinking a LOT about the next thing lately.

There is great wisdom in always doing the next thing as soon as you can. That way your life keeps moving and you don’t end up rusted in place like the Tin Man.

As a decades long victim of the doldrums, that really appeals to me. It would be a way to turn my “just keep going” abilities to something positive for a change.

But of course, first you have to know what the next thing is, and that’s exactly the kind of open ended question I can’t handle. ;

There’s just too many variables.

I can tell I am moving towards a watershed crisis because I have had a rough 24 hours and I am confident that this is all leading to some epiphanous fever-break kind of moment where I get over a huge amount of my bullshit all at once.

I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, but I have been having this problem where, starting at around 11, I get really really really hungry at night. I am talking pangs of hunger that feel like my stomach is trying to jump up my throat. Accompanying this phenomenon is the sort of mind-melting abstract confusion that tends to come when my blood sugar is low, complete with diffuse tingling and mild nausea.

It’s been getting worse over time and I feel helpless against it when it happens. I eat my usual midnightish snack and it barely makes a dent in it. It’s like I have some kind of demon in my stomach that tortures me if I don’t give it tons of food.

Well Monday night it was really, really bad and I am officially worried. I have no idea WTF is going on and why it only happens at that time but this can’t possibly be good. I  have to go back to my doctor and tell him about this and see what he thinks.

You can see why, despite having plenty of insulin, I haven’t taken it in a while. When my blood sugar is crashing this hard, taking insulin would be madness. And worse, it might even be fatal.

I really thought that when I went back on my diabetes meds, things would smooth out. And they did for a little while. But now I am storm-toss’d once again.

And when I go back to my GP, I will tell him that I can’t do the medical testing I should be doing if it requires a ten hour fast. Not happening. Not gonna do it. I can’t make it that long without eating.

Not without taking a huge risk with my health and maybe even my life, that is.

So that was Monday night. Today (Wednesday) I was lying in bed, relaxing, letting my mind wander, like I do, when I started becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

It was a feeling like nervous tension, by which I mean literally tension in my nerves. But harsh, like static sparks, and building up over time.

Eventually it got bad enough that I had to get the fuck out of bed RIGHT THEN. It was at this time that I realized I had also been getting hotter and hotter at the same time. And the staticky feeling was accompanied by a doozy of a tension headache that felt like someone was drilling into my temples with a very dull drill bit.

Luckily, getting up and moving around seemed to help, and the headache faded into the background once I took an Aleve.

But I have no idea WTF that was, and that scares me. It’s also what made me feel like there is some kind of transformative crisis coming for me, and I am mentally preparing for it while doing absolutely nothing to prevent it.

I’m just watching the cracks in the dike[1] form and spread out like spiderwebs, waiting without expectation for whatever comes, knowing that things can’t stay the same.

Wish it didn’t take a fllod to cleanse me, but here we are.

I also had a crisis of another kind this morning. I got up, started up Skyrim, and started playing. after playing a little while, this voice in my head said “Really? This is it? Is this all we’re going to do with our day?”.

This feeling has been building for quite some time. I am reaching the end of my proverbial rope. My soul cries out for something more and there is only so long that my addiction can hold it back before something gives and I find a new “thing” to fill my hours and give me purpose.

That’s an idea still waiting to be born, for now. That’s how it’s gotta work for me. It’s how it has always worked. All my big crazy projects have come from a long incubation period where I think about things ending in a big moment where the new thing is born and I immediately know that this is what I must do and thing progress from there.

So hard as it is, I just have to be patient and wait like an expectant father for my next bundle of joy to come along and give me something to do with my time.

Either that, or I will finally go completely crazy,.

Either way, I will be moving forward at last.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Hey, that’s another word for lesbian! LOL!

The frozen child

The Prince of Ice, everyone called him. People came from all around to see the mkagical boy whose very breath froze in the air and fell as snow. The boy who turned his morning orange juice into slush because he liked it that way. The boy who could fingerpaint frost onto glass in beautiful, intricate patterns, or pull water from the air to make a snowball appear in his hand. The boy who loved to bring cool breezes to hot days, delighted in making snow cones for his man cousins, and made his family proud with the cool ease in which he excelled at school. 

And all the people wondered how it was that he could do such things. Was he magical? Was his mother a witch or a fairy in disguise? What is some kind of genetic mutation caused by a secret government experiment? Was is God? 

But the answer was much simpler : 

He could do it because he was dead inside. 

And that made things a lot easier. 


Been pondering my icy childhood today after seeing a video that talked about how a single caring, stable adult in a child’s life can make all the difference between a child who grows up healthy and strong and one whoi becomes just another statistic.

And I thought, oh, so that’s what I was missing.

Because there was nobody there for me at all when I was a kid,. Nobody I could turn to when things got bad for me, which happened frequently. Nobody who would take my side or protect me. Nobody I could talk to about my problems.

Nobody willing to do so much as get up from their desk to keep me from being bullied.

It’s no wonder I turned so completely inward. There was nothing for me in the outer world but coldness, rejection, loneliness, and abuse.

So I retreated into books and TV and video games. I felt safe in that world. Still do. It might not solve anything but when I am absorbed by my distractions. I am not anxious or depressed or lonely or broken or sad.

At least, no consciously. Those emotions are always lurking under the surface for me, and that only makes me bury myself in my distractions all the deeper in order to escape them more thoroughly.

It’s my coping mechanism.

It’s also my addiction.

And what will kill me in the end.

Sooner or later, we all become victims of our coping mechanism, I suppose.

Like a lot of brainy children in bad situations, I retreated into the world of the mind. That’s what all the cooks and TV and video games was about. Those activities  occuipy my massive mind enough to keep it from picking at its own scabs and harming itself. There are no mental CPU cycles left for neurotic self-destruction.

I am safe from myself.

And yet those negative emotions the activities push into the dark corners of my mind do get stronger over time and weigh me down till I can barely move.

This, of course, is painful and sad and not healthy at all.

Luckily, I can escape all that with my books etc.

That is, more or less, how addiction works. Feeding the addiction makes problems worse. Addict responds to this pain  by escaping into addiction                     .

All addiction are a cure for emotions. Or rather, a treatment. A drug. A substitute. They are a way to stop feeling what you are feeling and keep those negative thoughts at bay.


The crowd outside the Prince of Ice’s home grew larger and larger every day. Everyone wanted something from him. Everyone had a need to fill, and saw him as the solution. Everyone projected their desires onto him. Everyone wanted his blessing. 

And he refused to see any of them, because then he would have to choose. 

At first the crowd had been small and friendly. But as the days dragged by, the crowd grew larger and the mood grew more dark. 

“Make the boy speak!” the crowd chanted. “He owes us that much!”

“If you don’t talk to them soon, ” said his Dad, “they will come for you, and all the security guards in the world won’t be able to stop them. ” 

The Prince just shook his head, and went back to painting with frost. 

 


Really feeling all those icicles piercing my heart tonight, which is why I chose to write about this subject. I look back on my childhood and I wonder how I survived it.

A child being alone in the world like that is just plain wrong. And it made me wrong. I have so much wrongness inside me.

Wrong not in a moral sense, but wrong like a broken limb is wrong. Things are not as they should be in me. Some part of me still retains the pattern of a healthy mind and knows that I didn’t get the emotional nutrition I needed in my childhood and that therefore there are large parts missing from my mental makeup. Parts that were supposed to be awakened by the warmth (and heat) of others and thre warm fresh blood of spring have instead remained frozen stiff and inactive in the deep freeze vaults of my inner world.


The dreamers sleep in their icy coffins, and dream dreams which are dark and subtle and full of oozing shadows and flickering lights and moments of clarity that happen too fast to be remembered.

Between the coffins long dark demons dwell, and walk with ghostly silence from dreamer to dreamer,  brushing the frost from the glass to peer inside.

And sometimes a dreamer feels their infernal heat and stirs, pressing up towards this sudden warmth, trying hard to remember what it was like to be alive.

At this the demon grins, and presses the buttons that force it to go back to sleep.

“It’s for their own good. ” they say to one another. “We are protecting them. ”

And then they laugh, and move on to another.


Tht actually seems like a pretty good start on a science fiction story about that old trope of the massive ship full of colonists kept in suspended animation.

They would start to be able to talk to one another. That much I know.

Anyhow, I guess that’s all the shrapnel I can disgorge tonight.

I will talk to you nice people in the morning.

 

 

Mental illness is crazy

No really, it is.

Just now, I realized something that I have come close to realizing before but never quite put all the pieces together before now.

And that is that I (like lots of other brainy creative types going nowhere) have been waiting for some kind of outside validation for my work and my talent while at the same time doing absolutely nothing that would get me said validation.

Like I am waiting for the world to make the first move.

And that’s obviously ludicrous. The world can’t make the first move if it doesn’t even know you exist. You have to do something to attract attention to your work, even if it’s just asking friends to link to it.

But a lot of us brainy creative types are, like me, cripplingly shy. For us, the idea of self-promotion is a nonstarter. Daring to point at your own work and say “Check out this awesome thing I did!” (or at least, “hey, this might be worth your attention”) is inimical to the shy temperament, whick is all about avoiding attention.

Ironically (and tragically), a lot of the really good writers (and other creators) in the world have that exact temperament and thus do not end up using their considerable talents to enrich the world and themselves.

Which brings us back to me.

Clearly, I have this exact sort of short-circuit in my brain. It’s a conflict between wanting to hide away from the world  and wanting to get paid to create.

And it’s a pretty big deal for me. It’s the primary conflict that is keeping me from going forward. My shyness and/or social anxiety is so strong that it keeps me from breaking cover and thus exposing my fragile ego to the world for even the tiny amount of time it takes to send a PDF somewhere.

And why I try, I suddenly bcome acutely aware of how sloppy and slap-dash my work is and how I would be embarrassed to have anyone see it, and so I can’t send it out until I clean it up, and that’s never going to happen, so…. once more, I keep myself in check.

In the chess sense of the word.

Luckily, I at least have a countervaling force within me, because shy as I am,  I also have a said that is a big ham who wants all the attention and is cocky and confident and ready to knock’m dead with my wit and charm and charisma at any moment.

So at least it’s not a matter of having to develop a whole new persona from scratch in order to get past this roadblock.

I just need to get rid of the bullshit that is clogging its connection to the rest of my personality, and let that self-satisfied son of a bitch take over sometimes.

I mean, what the hell. What’s thje worst that can happen?People think I am obnoxious? I can live with that. My cockiness makes people want to challenge me and take me down a peg? Bring it. I’m not easy to defeat, and could use the pushback in order that my skills and strength might increase. I piss some people off? Oh well. I am sure I won’t wreck their lives with my antics and people bounce back from that kind of thing.

It’s not like that side of me is a raging arsehole. He’s just willing to be loud and use my very powerful presence to make people notice me and give me a chance to impress them with my talents.

Sure, that comes with a huge ego. And those make some people uncomfortable because they think that if I think highly of myself, I must think less of them. Or, more simply, that the negative emotions like jealousy and a feeling of inferiority that I inspire in them are somehow my fault.

Fuck that. I refuse to own that shit. That’s their damage, not mine. I am not going to bend over backwards to protect people from my amazing awesomeness any more.

In that, sense, I am willing to give up on the whole “nice guy” thing. I will still be a super nice person, just not at the expense of my ability to strive forward in life.

So look the fuck out, world. I am coming through. One way or another.

Again,. I will still be the sweet, sensitive, undertstanding fellow that I am right now. Just at a higher volume and in vivid Technicolor.

I am sure letting my ego make decisions will seem unwise. Imprudent, even. But whatever. There is great wisdom in trying hard and making mistakes rather than holding back and making no mistakes because you don’t do anything.

There are worse then in life than being wrong. I can see that now.

And by extension, there are worse things in life than failure too.

In fact, all the evidence points to success coming from being willing to fail over and over and over again until you make it. Whether it’s business tycoon who got rich from the sixth business, or the movie star who waited tables and lived in their car for five years before they landed their first movie role, or the famous writer like J. K. Rowling who got rejected by every single other publisher before finding the one to take a chance with her, the number one rule of success is failure tolerance.

In that sense, every rejection is a step towards success.

I suppose the fear that lurks within the, shall we say, retentive artists’ soul is that they will find out that they suck at the art they practice and their whole world will fall apart when their artistic dreams die.

But that’s rigging the game against yourself.

Sucking at somethin is not permanent.  

It is, in fact, the larval stage of all greatness. Natural talent is great, but you still have to produce an awful lot of art that is nowhere near as good as youir favorite creators before you can approach their skill level.

After all, that’s what they did. The art you know, whether it’s a painting or a TV show, is the best product of people who have been at it for years.

And when they started out, they sucked just as much as you do.

Maybe even more!

I switched to the second person again, didn’t you? I mean, I?

Oh well. Guess I suck too, then.

But I still going to keep on trying.

And God as my witness, I will expose myself to the world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.