I really ought to give myself more credit in life.

I have done a lot considering my issues. Going to Kwantlen then VFS was a pretty big deal. I wrote a million words in 11 months. I’ve done hundreds of original videos, written 1000 words a day since 2011, written novels, gotten paid to write animation scripts. I wrote, directed, and was featured in my own original play. I started two online communities that are still running strong today.

That’s not nothing. That’s very much something.

And yet, it is so hard for my to really value it. My depression is always there to devalue and discount everything I have done.

It’s the only solution to the conflict between the concept that I have done things that count and that great black devouring darkness inside me.

It can’t count because I don’t feel any better.

I don’t feel any better because it doesn’t count.

It’s a heck of a catch, that Catch-22.

It’s the numbness. That darkness inside me is not some foreign invader. It’s the result of my mind numbing itself as a response to unresolved mental trauma. Like my mind is producing its own anesthetic to deal with all the pain inside me.

ALl that ice may isolate me, but it also keeps me safe. I wear it like armor to protect myself from the world I so greatly fear. Like a turle’s shell, it gives me someplace into which I can withdraw when I can’t deal with the world.

Of course, I would be better at  dealing with the world if I spent less time withdrawn into my shell. Another Catch-22 situation.

My life is full of them.

I guess I feel somewhat better today than yesterday,. The depression is still there but it is slowly fading. I still have a very great urge to hide from the world out of shame for what a horrid piece of shit I am, but it lessens by the moment, and I am sure I will be back to my more usual level of malfunction soon.

I was actually doing quite well until Friday night. I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was managing to remember that I am awesome on a fairly regular basis.

Which makes me suspicious about the whole damned thing. Part of me feels like, somehow my depression orchestrated the whole thing. It’s just a little too convenient that I got knocked down this far right when I was on the rise.

But if part of me really did bring this all about, then my hat’s off to it, because I can’t figure out how it did it.

I have long suspected that what we call fate or destiny or even luck is a result of a deep, deep level of intuition influencing our seemingly normal decisions in order to bring use closer to a certain emotional state or destination. We think we are making our choices based on logic and our immediate emotions, but behind the scenes this deep mind is weighting the scales so that we makes choices that move us closer to its goal.

That’s how people end up in the same situations over and over again, seemingly by chance. No single decision seems suspect and so it is only through seeing the pattern can we get some idea of the tricks our minds are playing on us.

And the desired state is not necessarily a pleasant one. On some level it is pleasing in that it relieves some deep inner fear or tension, but on the conscious level, it may suck.

A perfect example would be the people who keep ending up in abusive relationships. It might seem like they have the worst luck in love or that they have terrible taste in partners, but the truth is that some part of them wants that abusive situation.

Why? Because it’s familiar to them. Because it’s known. It’s a situation they understand. They know who they are when they are in that familiar role. Our minds will put us through a great deal in order to avoid having to deal with the unknown.

That’s the truth behind all that new age bullshit about attracting what you think about and changing that via some repetitive practice, like affirmations or mantras or writing you wishes down every day.

What that is really doing is reprogramming that deep part of you that influences your choices so that it seeks a different state.

And the thing is, this level of our minds involves a level of calculation and intuition far, far, far too complex for the conscious mind to hold. So subjectively speaking, it really does seem like some kind of ouside force is operating on us.

But it’s not fate or destiny or Jesus. It’s our own vast subterranean subconcious minds that are far, far smarter than the interface layer we call consciousness.

Damn it. I wandered off into intellectualization again, didn’t I? It’s so hard for me to tell when I am doing it. Maybe I need to limit my vocabulary when I try to write about myself and my own problems.

Pretty hard to intellectualize when limited to a third grade vocabulary.

Blah blah Donald Trump! *canned laughter*

I don’t know how to overcome my inability to value my own stuff. Perhaps that’s the point. The conscious mind I think of as myself can’t solve this kind of problem by its usual logical, rational, analytical means.

All it can do is try to move to a space where I feel comfortable valuing myself and thus change the state that my deep mind seeks and preserves.

I think that must be what is behind all my talk about new versions of myself. I have to sort of imagine my way towards a new default state. Otherwise, I will keep returning to the same old familiar place at the bottom of a dark cold ocean of depression.

In the immediate future, that means I am going to try to seek out the sorts of things that make me feel better about myself.

Because I deserve to feel good about myself.

After all, I’m a pretty amazing dude.

And it’s time I finally accepted that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(TO FELICITY : Nothing I write in this blog entry is meant as any form of criticism of you. That’s going to be hard for you to remember, but I want you to hold onto it and know it to be true. Your reactions were not to blame. They were exemplary.)

(To everyone else : tonight’s entry contains detailed and graphic discussion of male urination and its equipment. So don’y say I didn’t warn ya. )

Had a self-esteem crash last night and I have been depressed ever since.

Here’s what went down. I was hanging out with Felicity and Joe at Felicity’s parents’ place, watching videos and enjoy one another’s company like we do, when the time came when I had to get up and go to the guest bathroom to pee.

And this has been an issue with me in the past.

For some reason, when I pee in that toilet, I tend to…. sprinkle. Not all of it end up in the bowl. I dunno what is so different about that bathroom, other than the fact that the toilet is oddly small,. but for whatever reason, I have had difficulties.

And over and over and humliatingly over, I have had to mop upo after myself. I try extremely hard to control my stream with pin point precision, and yet it just keeps happening every time I use that bathroom.

I used to think that it was entirely my fault. I have noticed in the past that sometimes my stream develops a tributory, if you will. A side stream shooting off at a bizarre angle. This is, as you might imagine, very frustrating.

But that was caused by a small sore on the inside of opening of my foreskin, and that sore is long gone, so I know it couldn’t have been that.

Further evidence that it was not entirely a me thing is that I have checked many times to see if the same thing is happening at home, and it isn’t. There’s been some times when there were a few errant drops, usually because my diabetes and/or sleep apnea has made me dizzy and disoriented and thus thrown off my aim.

But it’s hardly a regular thing.

Nevertheless, the problem persists in that particular bathroom and I don’t know why.

Where the depression comes in is that sometimes when I clean up after myself, I don’t get it all, and thus leave traces of my urine behind for some horrified person, probably Felicity’s mother but possibly one of her students, to deal with.

This fact had already filled me with deep shame before last night, but I was handling it.

Last night, Felicity had even gone to the trouble of providing me with a bottle of Windex and some paper towels to aid in cleanup. And they really helped.

It’s just sad that I made her have to do that.

So I pee, and yup, despite doing everything I could to control my stream, it went everywhere. Windex and paper towel in hand, I did as thorough a job cleaning the floor as I could, checking every inch of linoleum. Then went back to watching stuff.

Fast forward to the end of the evening. Two things happened back to back that acted as a severe kick to the groin for my self esteem.

First, as we are packing up, I go to sit on this little couch that is out of the way of foot traffic and was yelled at and told I shouldn’t sit on the good couch.

I had been warned about this before, but I forgot.

But that phrase – the good couch  – really dug deep with me and activated all kinds of issues I have about myself.

It made me feel like a big dumb dirty dog who people only put up with out of pity and who is a major liability to all who know me.

On the heels of that, after assuring Felicity that I had done a thorough job of cleaning up after myself, she does a quick inspection and then reports back to me that not only had I failed to flush, but that I had left drops of urine on the toilet rim.

Seems I had concentrated so hard on cleaning the floor that I forgot everything else.

And that sealed it. Clearly, I am a frighteningly and disgustingly incompetent horror who is a liability to all who know him and who should just stay home all the time because he can’t meet the absolute minimum standards necessary to be allowed around people.

I mena, I’m not even fucking housebroken.

And that sent my mood into the tailspin of a shame spiral and I still have not recovered from it, and it’s been 17 hours and two sleeps since it happened.

So i really feel like scum right now. I’m a disgusting monstrosity. Thqat’s why none of my profs from VFS would give me a recommendation to any job. They knew I would be an embarrassment to them. It’s a wonder that people put up with me at all. I can only assume they do so out of pity.

At least, that’s how I feel right now. But there is one thing that makes this incident better than similar ones in the past.

This time, I told someone how I felt. I told Joe on the ride home that I was feeling really depressed. And that’s quite a big deal for me.

Normally, I never tell anyone about my depression while it is happening. And when I do discuss it afterwards. it’s usually in general terms which make it very easy for me to detach and intellectualize the whole thing.

And very little emotional openness is required.

But to admit it in realtime means opening myself up to another person in realtime, and that is the sort of thing I simply never, ever do.

People can get close to me. I can be a very warm and sensitive and understanding guy. I can look deep into people’s psyches and “get” them, and I am highly empathic.

But I don’t truly open up to people. Ever. In realtime, I am always the lovable funny guy with the unique point of view and a lot of charm.

But not last night.

I actually told someone about it while it was happening.

And I feel good about that.

I will talk to you nice people again later.

I’m not okay.

I know I tell people that I am,. but I’m not. What I really mean when I tell people that I am okay is that I am not in danger of killing myself any time soon and that what I get out of life is enough to keep me going exactly as I am for the forseeable future, and besides, what good would it do me to tell you how I really feel?

That would only lead to the sort of brutally awkward momet that social phobics like myself fear the most, and you’d ask if there was anything you could do, and I would say no, and that would be that.

Another awkward pause, conversation death, and me feeling like I just took a dump on someone’s front lawn for absolutely no good reason.

I can’t poison people with my pain. Maybe I should… but I can’t. To feel it reflected in them and know that I am the source of that pain is more than I can bear.

So far, the onkly person I have ever really opened up to is my shrink. And that took years of therapy because I was not consciously aware that I was sheltering him as well.  I thought I was being open and honest about everything, but I can see now that I never truly opened up until recently because I never actually let him see me angry and bitter and full of pain and shame.

So even the really good sessions were really only intellectual discussions with a coupcon of emotional content experienced from the cool detached vantage point analysis. At all times, even when I was evincing some emotion, I was in control of myself and my reponses, and careful not to give him more than he can handle.

Such is my belief in the toxic radioactive nature of what I keep inside is that I was more worried about not hurting my therapist than about getting better.

I know it doesn’t make sense on paper. He’s a therapist, for crying out loud. He’s seen a lot of people in anger and pain and had a lot of people spill their guts about all kind of crazy weird stuff and survived it just fine.

What are th odds that I am so bad inside that I would hurt him, maybe permanently? What fucked up short circuit of the mind caused me to think that I am so special, so intense, and so powerful that my psyhcological emesis would be more harmful to others than anyone else’s?

But like I have said here before, to me, the worst possible thing would be to lose my self-control in public and act purely out of emotion and subject others to the eternally imploding darkness of my scarrred and broken psyche.

I mean seriously. Who am I to do such a thing?

When it’s your therapist, you’re a sumbass not to do it.

But like a lot of people, I was convinced that if anyone saw the real me, the emotional leper falling apart inside, they would recoil in horror and flee the scene screaming and holding their noses.

My only hope of social acceptability was to be as charming and funny and nice qas possible while keeping the leprous side of me locked away in a deep dark distant closet and hope to God nobody ever saw him.

Hence my sense of shame.

But as we all know, locking your emotions in the closet only leads to more problems in the future because those emotions will wreak havoc behind the scenes.

And without anywhere to go, those emotions build up and purify to the point where they really do seem toxic. And that makes them even more shameful and worthy of hiding and you bury them even deeper, and the cycle continues.

And you do such a good job of concealing the bad stuff that you almost forget that it is there, and go around believing you are the person you pretend to be.

And you are. That pretender is you just as much as anything else in your head. But it’s not the real you because it’s not the whole you.

That leper assassin is still trapped inside you and keeping it locked up costs more and more every day until the cost becomes so high that you can’t function any more and you feel awful all the time and want to die.

And that, at its heart, is what depression is. And that’s the hell I have lived in for my entire adult life. Stewing in my own juices, toxicity levels rising, wth only the self-medication of my distractions (and, thankfully, psych meds) to help me deal with the pain of being me.

And all because I couldn’t let the bad stuff out. It’s still very hard for me. I can try to put it into words when I blog to you wonderful people, and drain it very slowly.

And that helps immensely. Without this blog, I would be far, far sicker.

But it’s a controlled release. A metered response. I am still in control. Nothing goes into this blog that I do not intend to reveal. The very act of writing it down slows things down enough that I can remain in control of the process.

What I truly is the ability to lose control and still feel good about myself. I know it’s possible. I’ve seen others do it. And I am sure it is possible for me, too.

But I am not there. Not yet. I feel like I am a newborn baby when it comes to exposing my shameful painful ugly rotten side to the world.

And as you can see by how I phrased that, a big part of me still believes that what is inside me is bad like shit.

And maybe it is.

But mine’s no worse than yours, and trying to hold it in forever is a very bad idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know what? Fuck it ALL. Fuck everything sideways.

I give up. Life wins. White flag time. I am through with trying to figure things ojut. I am done with trying to control outcomes via the power of my mind. I am finished with the constant, destructive self-analysis and judgment that stretches on and on like and endless autopsy, or should I say biopsy, as the patient is still, techincally, alive.

I just don’t care any more. I don’t care why I do things, oir who I am, or even what I am any more. I am sick and tired of trying to perform surgery on myself in order to get rid of the bad parts.

Fuck it. It’s all good. It’s all me. Even the depression is me. Bad stuff, good stuff, boring stuff, crazy stuff, it’s all just me in different maskis.

But I am not my masks. I am he who wears the masks. And if you see nothing when you peep through the eyeholes, just empty space, know that this is by intention and that the masks you know are not even my real masks.

The real masks are the ones that conceal my true self and they make me disappear.

Back to the point. I get lost in my own lyricism sometimes.

As if you didn’t know.

What I am saying is that I am giving up on trying to control things by mentally dominating them via the overwhelming force of my intellect..Predict, manipulate, arrange, analyze, and voila, you are the master of your life.

Fuck that. I can’t do that. Nobody can. It’s insane to think you can.

I am especially giving up on judging myself by the results. Setting yourself an impossible goal then judging yourself by your inability to do the impossible is the very definition of madness.

I also give up on always trying to see the big picture. Fuck the big picture. I hereby make my life small and fuck the greater context and “what is really going on”.

Whatever. Who cares. What does that have to do with my life? Nothing. Fuck soothing my pains via intellectualization and detachment and an Olympian point of view.

And fuck the past. It’s gone. None of it matters because it’s me, in the present, who is deciding what to do with my life,. and I am free to make the decisions that suit me.

I am sick and tired of getting frostbite every time the sun goes down up here on my Philosopher’s Mountain. Sure, the view is amazing. I can see so much from here..

But I am cold and I am lonely and I am tired and I just want to go home, wrap myself in a warm blanket, and go to where it’s warm because there’s people.

I am just a simple animal like anyone else, and it’s okay for me to be normal., at least some of the time. I don’t have to be a shining star or a freak of nature 24/7/365. It’s okay for me to be merely human.

In fact, it’s probably the best thing for me.

I just want to be a person with a life. Someone who does not worry about the big picture and focuses instead on his own life and how he can make it better. Someone who takes positive steps to improve his life.

And someone who does not spend a lot of time worrying about whether he is doing the “right” thing or making the “smart” choice. I just plain don’t give a shit any more. Smart, stupid. right, wrong. I don’t give a shit as long as I get on with it.

I have banked my fires for long enough. It is time to write on the sky with words of blood and fire, and carve my messages into the side of a mountain.

so I give up. From now on, I am going to do whatever seems like a good idea at the time,and suffer the consequences with a cheerful fatalism, knowing that I am learning lessons every time I get knocked down.

Then I get up again.

You’re not ever gonna keep me down.

Whatever happens, I want to keep on striving. I want to stay connected. I want to be a part of things. I want to remain among the living.

Time gap! I needed to lay down.

I am not feeling so good. I feel very woozy. It’sa lot like that feeling you get when you just got off a carnival ride and the lquid in your inner ear is still moving.

Plus I have this weird shaken up feeling like I’d had a nasty shock.

So, you know. That’s a thing now. I guess.

I have tried to clear my ears several times but it doesn’t seem to change things much/. So much for the “sinus fluid blocking ear dranage” theory of the crime.

Well if this is some psychosomatic (attic insane) bullshit my depression is pulling in order to discourage me away from all this radical resistance, I can tell it right now, it ain’t gonna work. I am through with all the fucking games my depression plays with me and I am officially calling on my id to rise up and bludgeon that fucked up superego into submission by brute strength and sheer force of will weilding a club made of raw primitive emotions and decades of impacted rage.

I’m pretty goddamned amazing. And I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I need to make that my new mantra : I have nothing to be ashamed of, I have nothing to be ashamed of, I have nothing….

Maybe if I repeat it often enough, I will start to believe it. Not “knowing what the right answer is” type knowing. I mean more like “knowing how to walk” knowing.

But that is for future me to worry about. Right now I gotta lay down before I fall down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am quite tired right now, and it’s for two reasons, one good, one not so good.

The not so good reason is the usual reason I am tired when I write these posts : because I stayed up till 8:30 am playing Skyrim.

More on that later.

But the good reason is that I spent all afternoon being busy and active and *gasp* even productive. I wrote stuff this afternoon, and the stuff that I wrote was good.

See, I got a nibble on this job on Upwork. Someone out there is looking for comedy skit writing talent and I am, as you know, full of it.

And their ad even contained an example of something of which I am increasingly fond, almost correct English.

This is their concept :

Comedy sketches with reacquiring and one time characters that explore satire of all types of situation in human life and interaction: human interrelationships, politics, current events, popular culture, trends and etc.

You see what I mean? It gets the point across and is not grammatically incorrect,. it’s just oddly phrased and has an unusual cadence to it.

Most North American speakers of English would not say “requiring characters”. They would say “reoccurring characters”. Instead of “human interrelationships”, we would just say “relationships” because the default assumption is that relationships are between people and involve more than one person, making the “inter-” redundant.

Also, the “and”  in “and etc” is redundant as well. It could be justg “trends etc” and it would convey the same message.

Damn I miss commenting on fellow students’ work at VFS. It’s rare that I get to exercise both my analytical and verbal capacities at the same time.

Anyhow, these people asked me specifically for a sample and they wanted me to take on Donald Trump.

How could I resist?

So that’s the good stuff I wrote this afternoon. It was sort of supposed to be three skits and instead it turned into five one-off jokes in skit form, but whatever.

Hopefully, they will look past that oversight and my slightly wonky way of formatting things and see that I am goddamned hilarious and brilliantly inventive and that I am particularly skilled at the kind of fast, high-density humour you see on Family Guy (Seth McFarland, watch the fuck out), and that is the kind of humour people LOVE.

Quick and snappy, like a comedy routine. But with pictures!

In writing the gags, I was calling on all my experience writing the Uno stuff in order to create content that really packed a wallop and made skilled and experienced use of the broad canvas of visual comedy to make comedy that is vibrant and lively and fun.

I might have gone a little too far in that. After all, I have no indication that these sketches will be animated, like Uno technically almost kind of was, and thus I should have restricted myself to things that physical humans can actually do for a reasonable amount of money.

But fuck it. I was showing off for a potential employer, and that is no time to be practical.  I went into this with the full intention of knocking them on their asses with how amazingly talented I am.

And I think I did.

Meanwhile, in the dull time-filling part of my life, I have finally given up on Skyrim Special Edition and gone back to the original Skyrim.

I stuck with SSE for around a month, and overcame its many technical issues and the paucity of mods for it in order to make it a reasonably fun experience.

Except for one thing. I could not get the sexytimes fun stuff to work. I tried everything I could find online, but no matter what I did, everyone involved just stood there in the same spot, causing them to look like some horrific Akira chimera.

But with genitals!

And I began to long for the good old days when I played the original game and the whole of Skyrim was a sexual smorgasbord of good clean perverted fun, and eventually, I decided I would re-install it just to use the sexy fun content.

But when I did this, I saw my mod list for the original game, and it had so many wonderful mods that I had missed so much when playing SSE, that I realized I ashould have stuck with the original, which has almost 29,000 mods for it. as opposed to Special Edition, which has maybe three thousand.

Oh, and here’s the kicker : the main selling point of SSE was superior visuals that featured high resolution textures and better lighting and blah blah etc.

Not “and etc”. Just “etc’/

So I figured I would be sacrificing some visual fidelity when I went back to the original game. Fair enough. Seemed like it would be worth it.

But when I started playing the original game again. I found I liked the visuals a whole lot better. In fact, everything looked gorgeous to me, and I felt this profound sense of relief bordering on joy.

And I think that is precisely because of the loss of visual fidelity. From the first time I played Special Edition, I felt like it was more of a strain on my eyes.

But I wasn’t sure until today. Playing the original game is downright soothing to my eyes compared to the Special Edition, and everything looks perfectly fine to me.

So the lesson is that there is no point in investing in high resolution graphics if you have low resolution eyes. Sure, I can tell the differences, especially in things like armor, but I seriously don’t give a shit.

I just know that it’s good to be back.

So all in all, a pretty great day so far. I hung out with my fuzzy friends while writing brilliant comedy mocking Trump and fiddling with my Skyrim install, and then played Skyrim and had sex with damn near everything I encountered.

And to me, that adds up to a very good day indeed.

And now it’s done!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s what I don’t get.

Conservatives are always so sure that any able-bodied person can just go out there and get a job if they really want to do it.

But that’s pure magical thinking, and it’s an evil magic to boot. There is no mechanism to insure that the number of jobs exceed the number of people in need of work. They have very little to do with one another.

Go ahead, ask conservatives why they think “you can always go work at McDonald’s”. They will have no real answer for you. They will mumble some bullshit about “common sense” or things “everybody knows”, but they can’t cite a single actual reason for believing this to be true other than their own moral laziness.

It supports their desire to avoid having to think about others, and therefore it must be true. It’s the laziest moral shortcut possible, and conservatives love those. They love them so much that they gleefully lower their intellectual and moral standards to the point where they basically don’t have it.

They believe it because they want to. It’s as simple as that.

As patient readers know, the place I come from, the Maritimes region of Canada, has a resource based economy and therefore suffers from chronic high unemployment, often double digit.  For my entire childhood, my home town of Summerside, Prince Edward Island has been overflowing with unemployed young people who would be overjoyed to work at McD’s… assuming they haven’t given up trying because even McD’s gets a hundred applicants for every job and there is only so much rejection someone can take before the despair sets in and they retreat into a world of parties and liquor and drugs.

And yet, my father parroted that “there’s always McDonald’s!” line over and over. And here’s the thing : he knew better. Not “he should have known better” , he knew better because he worked for the government of Prince Edward Island and dealt directly with the numerous training programs the province funded specifically to deal with the high unemployment rate of the problem.

And yet, he never asked himself “why don’t all these people in my training programs just get jobs at McDonald’s”?

It’s like they think, in that hazy twilit world at the outer edge of their consciousness in which thought can be said to take place, that McD’s is some infinite font of employment, as opposed to a business that only has so much money for labour and ergo only so much capacity to provide employment.

And yet, these are the same people who consider themselves defenders of capitalism. Well, I guess it’s easier to love an economic system (or anything else) when you don’t actually understand it and therefore can imagine it to mean whatever you want it to mean at any moment.

The truth is, to them, “capitalism” is merely an arbitrary label for the status quo. It’s what they have been told the system is called, and therefore they worship it. To them, “capitalism”, like “democracy”, is a simple code word that means “not change”.

And therefore, “not think”.

Like I have said before, the biggest fear of conservatives is having to truly think for themselves. They can’t tolerate doubt, and so they need to have their existing beliefs reinforced with all the subtely of a sledgehammer to the brain in order to keep their evil and insidious higher brain functions too stunned to make them uncertain about things.

And this is not merely a fuction of IQ. My father is no dummy. He’s a college educated man who loves to read and watch the news. It’s not a question of native intelligence.

It’s a lot closer to being a matter of temperament. Whether it’s nature or nurture, somehow a choice is made within a person that determines whether or not they react to doubt with fear or with curiosity.

Conservatives are so frightened by doubt and uncertainty that they absolutely must get out of it or avoid it by any means possible. That is why they are not at all choosy about what they believe and are willing to embrace patently absurd beliefs, not to mention morally repregensible ones, if they are the nearest exit from their fear.

Intolerable fear has a way of lowering your standards really fast. Take it from a social anxiety sufferer. When the fear is strong. you will do whatever it takes to escape it as soon as possible and to hell with your best interests.

I think it very much behooves us liberals (and, by extension, also behooves civilization) to understand this. If we want to lead people towards the light, we have to be ready to quiet their fears and provide them with a comfortingly familiar and safe path from where they are to where we want them to go.

The fear in them is so strong that they will simply invent whatever information they need in order to keep that fear at bay. That’s why Fox News works how it does. Fox News can operate sans facts because their viewers are not looking for information, they are looking for reassurance.

These people crave the safety signals that Fox News provides them. Fox News provides that signal by giving their audiences whatever messages they need in order to subdue their doubting minds and leave them feeling secure.

Otherwise, it would be just them and their own minds against the big bad scary world full of fear signals, like people who are not like you, crime shows on TV, and everything else that is scary and uncertain.

And that, to them, would be Hell.

That’s why they fight so hard against the liberal intellectual attempts to enlighten them. To them, it’s a fight for their lives against people who want to drag them out of the warmth of certainty and toss them into their worst nightmare.

When looked at that way, it is no wonder they react so violently against us well intentioned liberal intellectual types.

After all, to them, we are trying to hurt them.

And we won’t make any progress until we embrace this fact and learn to reassure them rather than attack them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, looks like I done fucked up again, idjit that I am.

I had a perfectly delightful idea for a story I was just about to write when I glanced down at the date and realized that I would not, in fact, be getting a cheque this Wednesday like I had thought.

A quick trip to the cheque issue date site connfirmed it. I am not getting a cheque until the 24th. Somehow, I had convinced myself otherwise. Somehow, I had ended up thinking that my five week month ended this Wednesday. Somehow, I had deluded myself into thinking that everything was going to be easy and fun.

I really should have known better.

Actually, I take that back. I could have known better. But I didn’t. And the battle against my corrosive self-judgment is fought in tiny battles like that one.

Now don’t worry, folks, I will be fine, My financial situation is not dire. I have savings to fall back on and GST rebate cheque coming sometime soon.

At least I hope it is. It’s long overdue. It was, in fact, what was going to pay my expenses for this week under my original idiotic  delusional inaccurate view of how things were. But it hasn’t shown up yet, AFAIK, and so I have been paying this week’s expenses via my savings, and it will be next week’s expenses that get paid for via that dang GST cheque.

So it amounts to the same thing, financially speaking.

Normally, I would be upset about how much money I wasted by overspending earlier in my month and then having to use my savings as a surrogate. That’s the sort of clueless behaviour I tend to scorn when I see it in others. After all, I am not some mushy-thinking overly idealistic anti-quantitative ninny who stumbles through life without a clue as to why they keep ending up in bad situations.

I am a smart and sensible Taurus who can deal with the limitations of reality and who is not afraid to deal in numbers and math and hard truths. I am clever with figures and keep myself to sensible limits and I simply don’t make that kind of mistake.

Except that I do, of course. Not as often as those who try to manage their finances via gut instinct and wishful thinking, but it happens to me too, and for the same reason.

Namely that there is something I want to be true and my mind jumps the logic gap to believing it without really examining it too closely.

In this case, a couple of weeks ago, I managed to convinced myself that “somehow”, I had enough money to spend $120/week for the next three weeks when that same money was actually supposed to cover four weeks.

Life is hard. I get so confused.

So obviously, my budget should have been $90/week, not $120/week. And that would have a little tricky. But I probably could have pulled it off if I had not made my mistake.

Or maybe I would have supplemented that income with my savings and it all would have ended up the same in terms of finances. There’s no way of telling.

Regardless, I don’t really give a shit. Whatever. Maybe I wasted money,maybe I did not. It all washes out the same anyhow.

I didn’t really know to do with the money anyhow. And I still have $275 in savings left. Eventually I will figure out what to spend it on. But there’s no rush.

Realizing I am not that attached to the money has made a big difference in how I felt about the whole thing. My income, thanks to the province raising my cheque substatially over the last year, is more than enough to pay for my modest expenses, and I am not the cash-starved creature I was before.

So whatever. I have a comfortable if not exactly lavish lifestyle. This financial SNAFU will have very little long term impact.

If I really wanted to, I suppose I could cook up a “could have gotten this thing if only I had not” scenario, but why would I bother? Fuck it.

I would have to find something I wanted badly first anyhow, and right now, I got nuthin’. I have video games I play for entertainment, this blog for getting my words, enough cash to eat out once or twice in a way and supplyh myself with snax, and that is pretty much all I need.

I suppose that makes me a modern Bohemian of sorts. Being the cerebral and socially disconnected urban hermit that I am, I have little desire for social advancement or the suiperficial signs of superior status.

Were I to land a steady paying gig I could do from home, I would love having the money, but I probably would not spend a whole lot of it, at least, not right away.

There’s things I coud use. A more comfortable computer chair would be nice. A brand new bed would be good. A sensible double instead of the king sized monster that I have now. One that is firm and springy enough to support my bulk without pressure points and cradle my poor stressed out back.

Not only would that be better for my back, but I would get like half of the space in my room back. So, plus plus.

A proper computer desk might help. My current “desk” is actually just a simple table, and while it gets the job done, I am open to the idea of a superior alternative.

Some kind of ergonomic mouse, keyboard,  and mousepad combo could save me some wrist strain. WOuld be nice to have soime super comfy clothes to lounge about in, as well as at least one very nice suit for business dealings and so on.

Hmmm. I think I just made my list of things I might spend my savings on.

The trick, it seems, is to start it off as a theoretical. That lets me shut out the option paralysis by taking away the stakes.

Thanks for helping me work that out, folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been pondering yesterday’s weirdness.

I feel better now. I should get that out of the way right off the top. I am back to whatever passes for normal for me, apart from a faint residue of shakiness, and so the whole ting is water under the bridge for me now.

So there’s that.

But what I have been pondering is the question of whyh my brilliant subconscious mind orchestrates this emotion experiences for me, and the only logical answer is that I need them. I need them because I am so freaking emotionally repressed that the feeling accumulate like water pressure building behind a dam until the damn thing breaks.

Clearly, it would be better if there were a healthier way for the pressure to be relieved. But I suppose I am not “there” yet.

Heck, I’m barely “here” yet!

So I suppose that yesterday’s emotional clusterfuck was cathartic, but not in the ultimately pleasant way of the past where something brings out the tears in me and while crying is not fun, I feel a whole lot better afterwards.

Followed, usually, by a post about the whole incident where I wonder why I don’t do this more often and link to a certain Peter Gabriel song.

That songs speaks to me on such a deep level that it’s almost religion.

Drink up, dreamers. You’re running dry.

Anyhow, the question of why I don’t do “it” more often has an obvious answer : because I am so emotionally repressed. Sure, it would be good if that damn dam of mine had a good enough sluice gate to let the emotions out at a rate that at least matches the rate wat which they come in, but that’s not happening any time soon.

Not unless I write for every waking hour of the day. And even then, I doubt I would ever really catch up on the backlog. I have 40 years of repressed feelings inside of me and while I am learning to put more of them into every word when I write, I sometimes doubt I will ever truly be free of them.

Oh well. It’s what has turned me into a writer in the first place. Normal people express themselves in other ways. It’s repressed neurotic verbal types like me who have to go about things the hard way and put it all in words.

And not just any words. They have to be the right words, expressed in a way that is not only comprehensible to others but actually worth reading.

It’s a heck of a complicated way to get shit done, but it’s the only tool I have.

And as much as people like to talk about when the only tool you have is a hammer, the whole world starts to look like a nail. they never mention that you might get really goddamned good with that hammer.

In fact, if you are lucky, you might just get good enough with it to hammer stuff for a living, and thus profit from your problem.

Which, of course, brings a whole new level of problems with it.

But then again, so does everything.

Life is a puzzle game.

I have also returned to my thoughts about my being of a nocturnal breed lately. When I find myself sleeping through a lot of the day, what other conclusion can I draw?

And there is this tension that builds up in me during the night and suddenly releases when the sun comes up. It gives me a feeling like I have finally finished my shift and now I am off duty and can finally relax.

That would fit my “they who tend the fire by night” theory of why some of us are night owls. In primitive times, when humanity was barely making it as a species as hunter-gatherers on the Serengeti, and fire was this new thing everyone was talking about, there had to be members of the tribe who would stay awake all night to make sure the fire that was their own defense against a sea of nocturnal predators did not go out.

And those night guardians had to be substantially different than their fellow tribesmen in ordfer to survive being out of sync with them. They had to need a lot less social and physical stimulation and be content to sit and watch the fire when the rest of the tribe was sleeping safe and sound.

Thoughtful loners, in other words.

I assume that they formed a sort of sub-tribe of their own. Smaller, but closer. After all, even us twitchy weirdoes need some kind of company.

I like to imagine these night guardians talking to one another through the night in order to stay awake, and that leading to them being deep and philosophical people who have quite literally looked into the darkness for so long that it’s become a part of them.

Of course, the opposite could be true, and they largely spent the night fucking.

That would also please me.

So broadly, the idea is that the tribes that had these night guardnians did a whole lot better than the ones that had idiots who fell asleep and let the fire go out and ended up getting eaten like some kind of carnivorous buffet by the hyenas, jackals, lions, vultures, and particularly ambitious hamsters of the Serengeti.

Thus, we can see how the evolution of a social species is far more complex than the old narrowly misconstrued Darwinian model of the selfish gene. How does one quantify the potential of the human genome to be expressed as various personality and/or temperament types? The individual may or may not directly profit individually from this potential, but they definitely profit from being part of a tribe of such individuals.

And here’s what will really bake your noodle : they profit even more from being part of a tribe that has some deep pheremonal method for making sure there are always some of each needed role in the tribe.

Right down to kinds of inborn personality traits new babies develop.

I will talk to you nice poeople again tomorrow.

Even I find myself to be worryingly weird sometimes.

Case in point, the events of this afternoon, which started something fairly innocuous and ended with my stressed out, shaking, and miserable.

It all started when my good buddy and feline head adornment Maelkoth pointed me to a particular game company called Rusty Lake and, in particular, their game Rusty Lake : Seasons, which is an escape puzzle type game in the horror genre.

The game is superb, and to think it was the company’s first. It has an amazingly spooky atmosphere, genuine scares, deeply disturbing imagery, puzzles that are extremely clever without being absurdly difficult (and that takes real skill), and a fascinating plot involving murder, insanity, time travel, and a cockatiel named Harvey.

So feel free to try it yourself. Be warned, though, it’s scary as heck. And it might well suck five hours of your life away like it did with me.

But nothing I am about to relate about my day should be taken as a reflection on Rusty Lake or their game. I am in awe of their skill and knowledge.

it should instead be read as a reflection of my fragile mental state that is the result of forty years of accumulated layers of neuroses piled on top of one another like some kind of mentally deranged baklava.

That said, let our tale begin.

I started playing it, and immediately got hooked^[1], which should have been my first warning sign. But I had frgotten the harsh lessons of my relationship to certain kinds of game from the past and so I plunged on enthusiastically.

And for most of the time. I was having fun, and so I didn’t notice my dangerously escalating mental stimulation level until the end, where things got real bad real fast.

I guess that’s the way it is with stimulus rushes, whether they are chemical or natural. You don’t notice how fast you are going until you are way out of control.

Oh, and speaking of chemicals, I had a fair bit of Diet Coke in me when all this went down, and I am sure that was a big factor in how far it went.

Anyhoew, I enjoyed myself for most of the afternoon, but eventually I ran out of gas. The unusually high level of agitation burned through all my blood sugar and sent that spiraling downward while at the same time, the high speed formance demands on my brain wore my nerves down to their raw little stubs.

And so I went into a pretty dark mental state where I was miserable and in multiple forms of pain but could not stop because I was going way too fast and had nowhere healthy to put all that energy should I try to slam on the brakes, and so the only way out was to finish the fucking thing.

My physical state wasn'[t much better. I was trembling, my heart was racing, my head hurt, and I was freaking out like someone who just woke up at the controls of a crashing 747 and has never even flown a Cessna.

And that’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder what the fuck is wrong with you. I mean, this was a video game, not the Indy 500. I was twitching like a speed freak and feeling like a coked up race car driver who just heard something go CLUNK.

And then seen their right rear tire roll past them, leaving a trail of fire behind it.

And I’m back. Decided to lay down for a bit to give myself time to cool down from all the game induced insanity.

And it worked. I feel a lot better now. Still pretty raw, but better.

So what happened? Why is it that this partciular knd of game does such prfoundly messed up things to my head? I mean like… WTF, dude?

It definitelt has something to do with the mental stimulation of puzzle solving. Other sortgs of video games do not tax my mental CPU nearly as much as one of these puzzle based games.

That’s because the puzzle genre requires multifaceted multi-threaded problem solving that involves examining things from many different angles all at once and I think that really wears my poor overclocked brain out.

And the escape subgenre in particular packs these kinds of tricky puzzles together so densely that it is no wonder that I end up in a strange mental state if I don’t make sure that I take them in via small, managable chunks.

And even then, maybe I should just skip the whole thing. I am old, fat, and diabetic, with a lot of blood circulation issues, and I should probably avoid things that bring me to a high state of agitation while sitting down.

That’s how fat guys die.

To add to it all, this all happened in a period where my body is re-adjusting to my diabetes medications, and so who knows what the hell is going on with my blood sugar.

Plus, I had a light lunch today because part of that re-adjustment is low appetite, and no matter how much I tell myself that I ave to treat food like medicine during those times, that shit is still very hard to negotiate with when the chips are down.

So yeah. Typical personal clusterfudge. Somehow, event conspire in a way that seems downright choreographed to produce a huge emotional moment for me, and afterward I am left wondering just how brilliant I must be in order for my subconscious mind to be so goddamned clever.

I suppose it has to be if it is to fool my oh so clever conscious mind.

That train of thought does not go anyplace good.

So here I am, with full knowledge that I went through manic Hell today because I chose to play the wrong kind of video game.

God it sucks to be me.

But I guess someone’s got to do it.

Otherwise I wouldn’t exist!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am in my usual post bad sleep state.

You know the drill. ^[1] Mental fog that is thick and clinging. Sickly sticky flop sweat all over me, making me feel glazed, like a ham. A vague tingle permeating all my body, no doubt the rest of sleep apnea’s oxygen deprivation. Disorientation and a disconnected and detached confusion. Heavy feeling in the limbs.

And so the words are not coming easy right now. I am drinking some Diet Coke and eating an apple, and hopefully one or both of those will help liven me up so I can think and pulls my collective poop together.

If not, I will just have to push against the veil in order to get anything done. Like usual.

Oh well. This too shall pass. And I have reasons to be happy with myself. I finally got my diabetes meds, and so my blood sugar should be on track soon. No more attacks of keen cutting hunger, hopefully. ^[2]

That shit gets real old, real fast. I suppose it’s my body’s response to dropping blood sugar levels. But fat as I am and with all that I eat, I should not be getting gut wrenching hunger pangs three hours after a full meal.

And most of what I eat is real food, too. So it’s not the malady of modern malady of mallbnutrition, where people are fat and starving at the same time because they don’t get enough nutrition from all the crappy food they eat.

So what do they do?

Eat even more crappy food.

It’s downright barbaric, when you think of it.

So anyhow, I am on track to get my health back. And my career, because I applied for five different jobs on UpWork yesterday.

So, yay me on that. Dunno how much of a chance I have at any of them, I don’t meet all the qualifications for any of them. But none of them are hard requirements, just “preferred candidates” type stuff.

I mean seriously. 1000 hours of paid work on UpWork? In your dreams, people. Especially for those of you looking to pay as little as possible.

I mean sure, I could put an ad on craigslist looking to buy a three bedroom apartment in the middle of downtown Vancouver for a dime, but it wouldn’t be very realistic.

Beside, I am brash and cocky enough to think that the overwhelming power of my talent as exemplified by my work is enough to compensate for such minor concerns.

I hope to continue job hunting till I get something. I was a much healthier person when I was working. I had purpose and direction and definition in my life, and I desperately need all three of those in my life in order to help me retain my shape.

Otherwise, I lose resolution and dift into being as I am now, a vague grey cloud that blogs and plays Skyrim.

And that’s not enough to keep a soul alive. A body, sure. A brain, most definitely.

But not my soul. Not my heart. There is so much more to life than I have been experiencing. So uch so that it scares the bejesus out of me sometimes. Just thibnking of that big,  loud,  intensely real world out there makes me so scared that it makes me want to burrow even deeper into my safety pit and shut my eyes tight to block it out.

But it’s also the cure for what ails me, I have a massive number of unmet needs. In fact, arguably, I haven’t even made it to the second from the bottom layer of Maslow’s hierarchy yet. I have food, shelter, heat, and water, and I have friends.

But the rest just plain ain’t there.

And the only way I will cure this malnutrition of the soul is if I embrace the real world. That’s like, the very first step.

Not all at once, of course. In baby steps. It’s like exposure therapy for phobias. You don’t cure someone of arachnophobia by going right for the tarantula on the shoulder on day one. That will only make things far, far worse.

So, baby steps. Seems simple enough. But there is always a strong force on me that wants to turn away from the world and silently weep. A part of me that is permanently freaked out and can’t handle anything and can’t possibly get far enough from that big bad real world in order to truly calm down.

And it can’t be a straight up fight between the two sides of me any more. That’s not going to work. Instead, I want to give that silent weeper a deep warm hug and hold on tight until it is all cried out and then listen while it tells me why it’s so scared and pours out its heart to me and tells me the whole sad story, warts and all.

So, look for a reply to my letter to myself some time soon.

Probably. Hopefully. Whatever. Either way is fine.

In fact, I had planned to write that today, but the bad sleep left me in too mentally messed up a state to focus enough to do it.

Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow I will have all day to myself. Tonight, I am getting together with tout le gang to go out for dinner then hang out here in Fanhattan.

So I didn’t have the luxury of waiting till my mind cleared before the bloggening.

Right now, I am going to lay down again, probably take a nap. Hopefully, this time, I will wake up feeling better.

It’s been known to happen.

And I am too tired to do anything else anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.