The first thing you need to know is that I love you.

Truly. Deeply. Madly. Badly, even. I know I have been very hard on you in the past and that was wrong, and I am sorry.

I won’t even try to defend it. It was wrong, period.

And, well, I respe ct you too much to lie and say that from this point on, it will never happen again. We both know that change is not that easy and that you can’t just wave your magic wand and become a totally different person overnight.

But please, please know that no matter what happens in the future, I do love you and want the very best for you.

I just learned a lot of bad habits growing up and it will take me a while to unlearn them.

The last person you expect to be the victim (and perpetrator) of a cycle of abuse is yourself, I guess. You’re too close to the problem. You think there always has to be one villain and one victim and they can’t be the same person.

And yet here we are.

And I want to do better. I really do. But that means you and I have to work together on changing things. I can’t do it on my own.

If that makes sense in this situation.

I guess that means that villain (me) has to work with victim (you. who is also me), and that might not seem fair. Why should the victim have to have anything to do with the villain, let alone work with him? Why should the villain get away with all that abuse instead of having to suffer like his victim did?

And all I can say to that is that, fair or not, that’s the only way this will work. We are stuck with one another and so we have to learn to live in harmony with one another or this depression shit will keep us locked in this here cage till the day we die.

And that starts with confession. I’ll start.

Son, I have been just plain rotten to you. The absolute worst. Worse than our actual dad ever was. Where he left off, we picked up the ball and ran with it. Larry Donald Bertrand, our father, could not have judged you more harshly even at his angriest.

And I am truly sorry for that. I guess when you have a lot of bottled up anger and bitterness with no way out, you take it out on yourself, and that only makes it worse.

Again, not an excuse, just an explanation.

I have judged you by unhumanly harsh and utterly arbitrary standards and then punished you for failing to meet them. I have persecuted you unrelentingly and unfairly to the point where the only way to escape my judgment was to stay home and do nothing that had any impact on the world.

Only meaningless actions could escape my wrath. And then I got mad at you for not doing anything with your life

And that only made things worse as well.

So from now on (more or less), we are starting over. Pretend you’ve just been born. No past, no history, no context. It’s a new year and you are a new you.

And despite the dire comndition of the world these days,  you have the whole wide world of possibilities just waiting for you to go grab them. You are old by the clock but young at heart, and the world needs people like you to get things done.

You know how they say youth is wasted on the young? Not so with you!

And you are absolutely loaded with talent. There are people in the world who would give an arm and a leg and half their genitals to have even one tenth of what you have.

All that, plus you’re crazy smart and one heck of a nice guy. That is one heck of a package. That is way more than enough to get your life started in a positive way.

So what if you are not that good at life’s little details? Fuck that. You’re a genius, you don’t have to be good at life. Find a home for your talents and the rest will take care of itself. The world has support systems in place for the fragile geniuses of the world.

You just need to prove yourself to be the useful kind of genius first. And you are a brilliant and hilarious writer. Everyone says so.

So what are you waiting for? G out and meet that wonderful world out there! Notg because you are supposed to or because you are a loser if you don’t or any of that counterproductive judging crap I have laid on you before.

But because you want to do it. You deserve to do it. When it comes to personal assets, you are Fort Knox, and it’s time to go spend that gold and have some fun.

And who knows, somewhere along the way, you might even get that normal life you have wanted for so long. I know you and I have seen you looking in the toy shop window at that big shiny merry go round called everyday life, where people have jobs and lives and social circles and co-workers and relationships and sex and all the other good things normal people take for granted.

It’s all out there waiting for you to claim it. The only thing stopping you is yourself.

Meaning me, really. And I promise to do better. To stay out of the way, to support you without hesitation or judgment, to stop nipping your self confidence in the bud before it has a chance to grow and blossom, like a killing frost.

Fuck that, You are hot and incandescent and alive, and it’s high time you felt that way. To hell with rational restraint and sickly safety.

YOU ARE ALIVE. YOU EXIST. YOU MATTER. YOU COUNT. YOU ARE IMPORTANT. YOU ARE NOT BROKEN, TOXIC, PATHETIC, HOPELESS, HELPLESS, OR A LOSER. YOU ARE A BRILLIANT SHINING WONDER THAT BRINGS WARMTH AND WIT TO ALL WHO KNOW YOU AND EVERYONE WHO GET TO KNOW YOU IS BETTER OFF FOR IT. YOU ARE AMAZING. AND I LOVE YOU. SO DO A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE. AND WE ARE ALL VERY PROUD OF YOU.

So go out there and show the world what we already know : that you are straight up phenomenal and a wonder to behold.

We’re all pulling for you to go out there and shine. Shine so bright that people a million miles away are warmed by it.

And who knows…. maybe even you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Wow. That opening. To me, it seems like a parody of romance movies. It’s too self-consciously pretentious to be real, right?

Not only is it real, the movie was a huge hit. So what do I know?

Got my ass to my MD today, and I am proud of that. I ran out of my diabetes meds ages ago and lacked the gumption and wherewithal to make the appointment to get more.

And then, of course, the issue became how embarrassed I was to have let things go like that and that pushed me even further from doing it.

That’s the depression talking, of course. Doing its thing where it compels me to further and further self-neglect by having one mistake create another, and so on.

But it’s a new year, and I am determined to get my life back on track, and the first stage of that is getting healthy again.

Or at least as healthy as I was three months ago.

The appointment took longer than usual because most of it wqas conducted by a very sweet but not at all ready for prime time medical student.. A round-faced Asian girl named Laura, who I am sure will make an excellent MD some day.

After all, some things you can’t learn any other way than to do it badly for long enough to get better at it.

Roller skating springs to mind.

So Laura was a tad lost at sea. Luckily, she had a  benevolent and patient person to practice on, namely me.

I admit, I was getting a little bored and twitchy by the end of our 45 minute appointment, though. Even I have my limits. Another half hour, I might even have gotten cranky.

Or maybe not. I am still testing my testiness. I know that learning to be cranky or at least snarky now and then is a vital part of my recovery because it means I am developing the ability to protect myself emotionally and express my true emotions.

But it’s rough going. I am so terrified of hurting people. My therapist has repeatedly told me that people are a lot less fragile than I think and that they can handle me being less than perfectly pleasant now and then.

And I know he’s right. It’s not natural or healthy for someone to have no capacity for grumpiness. To hold myself to this extremely high standard of behaviour is lunacy. Most people are irritable some of the time.

And this exaggerated sense I have on the power I have to inflict harm on others with my words and how I express them is probably just my depression in disguise, right?

Yeah,. Probably. I guess.

But I can’t shake the image of myself as some combination of Sam Kinison and Dennis, the fat kid from Head of the Class, lashing out at people with all the power of my psychological insight and withering wit like I am Hannibal Lecter as an insult comic.

it could be pretty brutal. I am a very unbalanced person and that kind of thing can lead to horrifying consequences when it finally rights itself.

And all that suppressed rage comes exploding out of me like canon fire and I end up hurting a lot of people with my id driven verbal attacks.

It’s just plausible enough to be crippling.

That’s why I want to find a safe release for all of that ire. Some way it can express itself without harming undeserving others.

So I need to find deserving others, I guess.

That’s not who I want to be, though. I don’t want to be another angry screaming fat guy who can’t take it any more. I don’t want to lash out blindly. I don’t want to be the sort of guy that everyone avoids at parties.

Might be too late on that last one, actually. My social damage makes it hard for me to mingle. In fact, just typing the word mingle made me anxious.

That’s one of the worst words in the English language to a social phobic like myself.

Back to the point. So I don’t want to be The Angry Guy.

But it’s who I am right now, and I would be better off if I expressed it and got it off of my chest instead of letting it dester and rot inside me, poisoning me from within.

What I really need is a lngthy course of emotional dialysis. Clear out the toxin in my psyche. Filter out the bad stuff and replace it with good, clean blood.

Anything to make this feeling of deadly dirty decay go away.

I could turn my rage into political commentary, I suppose. It’s certainly the right age for it. But becoming a professional ranter has always seemed like a dark path to me. One that leads to heart attacks and income tax and turning into a jaded and bitter hack.

And it’s so limiting! What if I am feeling positive and happy and want to put out a feel-good message that will make people feel better about themselves? What then?

And why the fuck am I having a serious anxiety attack right now? It hurts so bad, like I am haunted by my very own personal banshee is screaming and wailing and scratchings its claws along the cliffside inside me.

Perhaps blogging and caffiene don’t go together as well as I thought they did.

I know! I will magically transform the anxiety into excitment!

Yeah, I don’t think so.

Instead, once I am finished my words, I am going to do what I always do in response to negative emotions : I am going to lie down until they go away.

And go away they will, because you can only remain adrenalized for so long without reinforcement before your body scrubs that shit out of your blood and returns you to whatever state youi consider normal.

Am I normal? Not often and never on purpose.

Hopefully, after some lights-out time, I will be able to relax and the mean ol anxiety attack will lose focus and wander away.

Because this shit fucking hurts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pop quiz, kiddies. Today’s blog entry comes with homework.

Go read this article.

And don’t give me any of that TL;DR crap. If you can read my daily 1K, you can read a long twitter thread.

Done? Good. You may take one cookie from the jar.

Now was that not amazing (the article, not the cookie)?In it, Sarah Silverman demonstrates the exact kind of superior morality that I deeply respect and consider to be downright holy.

It’s all about being able to see past the immediate situation and what all our instincts are telling us to do – namely to meet anger with anger and struggle for dominance with those who attack us.

That’s why “The Devil in the Dark” is my all time favorite Star Trek episode of all time. In it, Kirk sees beyond the very human desire to kill any animal which threatens us and looks at the larger picture, asking himself why this creature is attacking people and what might be the larger problem.

And make no mistake, the Horta is freaking terrifying.  Kirk could have gone in there, phasers blasting, and killed the fuck out of the Horta, and been hailed as a hero.

But that wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted to understand the real story and did not fall into the “us versus the monster” mentality that the miners (and me, the first time I saw the episode) so naturally fall into.

I am serious. I wanted him to kill that fucking thing. So imagine the impact when I first saw “NO KILL I”.

Blew my mind.

Anyhow, back to Sarah. I am particularly impressed by her compassionate response because she is clearly in the socially dominant position. She’s rich and famous and her opponent is poor and miserable and fucked up in the head.

I feel ya, bro.

So she totally could have said something scathing and mean and the Internet would have loved her for it if it was funny enough. When we like a celebrity, we think it only fair and just that those that oppose them learn the error of their ways.

That’s what they get for messing with our beloved alpha! High 5’s!

But instead, she chose to ignore the hate and look into what would make a person lash out at a celebrity and was rewarded by seeing things as they truly are, with context attached, and instead of continuing the cycle of violence begetting violence, she held out a hand to the ghost that haunts her and found that even the villains have souls and lives and feelings and reasons for doing the things they do.

This is not the natural way people see things. It can bring up strange and difficult conflicts in our minds as we struggle to overcome our instincts in order to help someone we already hate because of their anger towards us.

That’s why I feel the need to emphasize that this superior morality is always a choice and never an obligation. It’s the extraordinary outlier and thus can never become the expected mandatory minimum.

And like all striving towards higher morality, it is just as much about improving oneself as it is about improving the world. When we stretch our souls towards higher moral ground, we end up feeling better about ourselves in the process. We can sense we have made our souls bigger, stronger, and more pure by this striving, and so even on a deep gut level, we feel more whole, more sane, more free.

Much of this message gets garbled, lost, or downright contradicted by modern religion. They try to make this superior compassion mandatory, thus poisoning the whole process and turning compassion into a battle of wills instead of a source of joy.

Now you know where most of this “you can’t make me share!” sentiment comes from.

The proper approach is to preach the joy of selfless action and tell people, in detail, and with true understanding, how compassionate action can lead to salvation in the here and now by taking us out of our everyday lives and self-oriented concerns and lets us breathe fresh air above the usual pollution and stagnancy of everyday life.

We do such a poor job of explaining this to people in modern life. Spirituality is about what is good for the spirit, not what people “ought” to do. That is a hard idea to get across in this materialistic individualist age, and it often gets tangled up in the errors and excesses of various well-intended religions.

There is a bulletproof case for the selfish benefits of selfless action sitting there in the religious literature, and yet nobody seems to be making it. Instead, we have this poisonous dichotomy between spirituality (which sucks and is not fun) and people’s natural inclination to enjoy themselves.

In reality, there is no such conflict. Doing good feels good, and that’s really the only rational enlightened hedonist argument that needs to be made. Even if you are one hundrent percent selfish sociopath, you should look into the benefits of helping others because in doing so, you end up happier and better off for the effort.

It’s programmed into us. Being social animals, we get pleasure from actions which benefit members of our tribe and/or the tribe itself.

Personally, I find the very idea of an entirely self-oriented life to be positively stifling. To be trapped in that tiny box of your own self-interest seems like hell to me.

But then again, nobody has ever forced me to give up something I valued in the name of compassion. I have never been violated that way. It sounds horrible.

To have your person (via your property) violated by people claiming the higher moral ground due to “compassion”?

Yeah, that could give someone issues that last a lifetime. And a paranoid response to the word “compassion”, which is forever linked with sudden deprivation in your mind.

And all because “compassion” was forced upon someone who wanted to exercise their need for dominance and control from behind the cover given by religion.

How very selfish of them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I keep endingup feeling really bad lately and I am sick of it.

Right now, I am in the “post bad sleep” version of feeling really shitty. I feel all floaty and dizzy and shallow waves of vertigo are passing through me constantly. As a result, I am weaving a little as I sit, and I feel like I am going to fall, or that I am already falling, or something like that anyhow.

That means I am also playing tag with reality. Or maybe pat-a-cake. I keep drifting off then patiently towing myself back into focus. It’s quite tedious and irritating.

Oh, and I am sick.

Specifically, have the cold type thing that my roomies Joe and Julian also have. That officially makes this a “sick house”, or masoin maleur, as we called it back home.

So right now, I have heavy lung and a runny nose. No doubt my near future will involve a lot of mucus. I am very tired (of course) and the urge to hibernate is incredibly strong,. But I am too stubborn to give in to it.

I want to live, god damn it, not sleep my life away.

The sensible thing for me to do, because it’s worked in the past, would be for me to simply induge the urge to sleep until I catch up with my dreaming backlog and can approach the world with something like true wakefulness, at least for a little while.

But I don’t wanna. I want to be awake and do things and live some kind of life. I might not have much of a life but I want to live it just the same. The idea of spending all day asleep, even if it is jus for one day and for completely sensible and intelligent reasons, is appalling to me. I don’t want to get left behind by time.

So I fight it.

That makes even less sense than usual when I know damned well that I am sick. What do people tell sick people to do? Get plenty of fluids and plenty of rest.

Those two things always seem contradictory to me, because if you are getting plenty of fluids, your rest will be interrupted by getting up to go pee all the damned time.

Take it from one who knows.

But anyhow, clearly, the sensible thing to do when you are sick is to sleep as much as your body wants you to sleep. That way,m your body can fight the virus or whatever without your conscious mind around to divert precious resources into things like thinking and moving and such.

But still, I fight it.

I fight it like some prize fighter who has taken too many hits to the head this bout and is half-blind and staggering around the ring punching anything that looks like his opponent and really should just go down and stay down but the part of the brain responsible for such decisions left early to beat the traffic.

And there’s no ref around to declare a TKO. In fact, my opponent left too. It’s just me fighting the ghosts in my head in an empy boxing ring in an empty stadium, the lights turned off exscept for the ones in the ring.

It’s all very arty.

Well I am gonna hit the mat for a while, I will finish here when I get back up.

I feel a little better now.  Enough to get some more of my words out, anyhow.

Still not sure what to do about the Xbox One. I could sell it. I could use it. Both options have their ups and downs.

Maybe this is one of those times where I should just myself what I want to do about it. And the truth is that what I actuallt want to do is hook that sucker up. My inner chuild is quite excited at the idea of having an awesome new toy to play with, one that will let me finally be able to play the newest hotest games.

Then again, so does this PC of mine. It’s affordinf them that’s the tricky bit. I end up playing games that are at least four or five years old becauise those are the ones I can afford. New games are like $60-$80 and that is a bit too much for me,

Plus, with a price that high, eve n if I have the money, the option paralysis that comes with the higher financial stakes would be crippling.

I am such a mess.

But I am doing my best to banish such negative thoughts and build some kind of workable psyche for myself. And that’s made me start wondering about arrogance.

You see, I think one of my big problems when it comes to interacting with others is that I send mixecd messages. I pretend to be normal-ish and I am always polite and sensitive and nice and in that sense I am sending the message that I am harmless and nonthreatening, and therefore not particularly dominant or alpha.

At the same time, I have a quick, forceful, and powerful mind and a strong personality that constantly demands to be expressed. I am naturally a pretty pushy person due to this energy, and if I was less depressed, I think I would want to take charge a lot more than I do now, which is practically never.

That’s all quite alpha.

This mixed message confuses people and adds to the strange emotional affect that leaves me feeling like an alien whne people stare at me in blank incomprehension when I talk to them.

So I wonder if I would be better off just going with the side of me that it cocky and arrogant and thinks he’s the smartest guy in the world. It woulkd do wonders for my self-confidence, and it would send a clear message as to what to expect from me to the world. It would disinhibit me and give me access to assets like my charisma and force of personality and pursuasiveness.

And all that is really stopping me (besides mental illness) is fear of people thinking I am an obnoxious asshole.

There are worser fates.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just woke up from some of that rough sleep and hence I am feeling rather like I have been through the birth canal of a very petite woman a dozen times today.

I honestly don’t know bhow the rather compact Acadian ladies of my homeland manage to be so fertile.

I’m going to assume that the magic ingredient is Catholocism.

so right now, blogging is the last thing I wanna do. But as always, there is no question of not doing it. This space needs filling each and every day.

And I need to do it. Otherwiose, the words in my head get backed up worse than usual and that hurts.

So merrily, I trudge along.

My Xbox One S finally showed up. The one I won from a McDonald’s contest.

I will pause now to take note of that, I’m a winner. I won something. Right now, I have a new, in box, never opened Xbox Obne S (Minecraft Edition) sitting on my bed waiting for me the decide its fate.

I’m not a loser. I’m a winner. I won something. I WON. I feel like I need toi repeat this a million times in order to counter the inner programming that says quite the opposite.

I really have no reason to hink myself a loser. After all, in order to lose, one first must play. I’m more of a non-player. A sitter-outer. A concientous objector.

SOmeone who has been on the injured list for a very long time.

I wish I could be reborn. Not in the birth canal way mentioned above. Just in the sense of being able to start over,. free of all unwanted contexts.

Like life had saved games and I want to load one from before I made a lot of crucial mistakes so I can now avoid them.

Life doesn’t work like that, though. Reality is broken, after all. Only the world of video games has perfect justice. Hard work is always rewarded, progress is mesurable and guarnteed if you put in the time, and the bad guys always get it in the end.

And at your hand, no less. Making you the oft praised hero of the land. Meaning your hard work is not only rewarded but recognized and acknowledged.

Marx would be please. Sort of. Not reallty. Forget I brought it up.

Not sure what I will do with the Xbox. Might sell it, might keep it. If I keep it, I can always hook it up to my  computer monitor and play games that way.

At least I think I can. Everything has so many input and outputs these days that I am sure I would be able to find a match. Might have to but some cables but that’s it.

And I suppose it would be nice to have a current-generation console. But I have a current-gen computer already and I can buy and play all kinds of games on it, so I am not sure why I would give a damn about playing games on a console.

And yet, the idea appeals to me. I suppose it’s nostalgia. I’ve had many hpurs of fun playing games o n consoles, and there is a purity to the experience – probably because there are no other things going on like with a PC – that is very appealing.

And o n a practical level, the games can look and play better than on a PC because they are being developed and programmed for a particular piewce of hardware with known capabilities, unlike on a PC.

So I don’t know. Might keep, might sell. Looked up the price. and it seems like what I have goes for around $300 CDN retail. So getting $200 CDN for it should not be hard.

Dunno what I would spend the $$$ on tho. So there’s that.

Damn I wish I could go right back to sleep. I want to sleep all the time these days. It’s like winter is making me want to hibernate.

Except at night, when the world is quiet and I am alone and most people are asleep and therefore I can play Skyrim for hours and hours without distraction.

Then I perk right the fuck up. Sigh. Those hours are my most alert and mentally engaged and on sync with the world.

The world of Skyrim, that is. Further sigh.

But right now, I just wanna sleep. That’s what happens when you stay up till 8:30 AM in the fucking morning. I have had spome sleep due to lovely Trazadone, but it is still not enough. I want to sleep for like, three days.

But nonight I have FRED and hanging out with my wonderful friends.and before that, oif course,I have to finisgh my words, and I will need to get a shower at around 5:15 pm in order to be presentable for FRED at 6 pm, and so forth and so on.

I would be so much better off if I got to sleep at some human time. But I can’t seem to remember that when I am in the zone playing Skyrim and reluctant (to say the least) to take a sleeping puill and leave the mental state where I am connected and purposeful and feel connected and contended and confident. and plunge into the draining and depressing world of sleep, where I always wake up feeling crappy and confused.

It’s a bum deal. But I asm not so stupid (yet) as to think I can solve that by means other than just going to sleep earlier.

Like that’s going to happen.

Oh well. Almost done. Then I can crawl back into bed and nap for a couple more hours and then get up to face the day with something like sentience.

Hopefully, this time, I will wake up feeling at least a little better than I do now. Lately, it seems like I end up feeling really bad every day and that really sucks.

Want to get back into taking better care of myself.

Right now, I gotta lay down before I fall down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

That’s hpow my brain feels right now.

Here, I will open up my skull so you can feel it yourself.

(SFX : Creaky lid opening, soft disturbing squishing)

I just finished a long and quite epic quest mod in Skytrim, the last part of which involves a hell of a lot of quite difficult fightng while trying to find my way through an underlit and visually boring dungeon (it’s a factor in the fatigue, trust me) that culminated in me having to fight the biggest fucking monster I have ever seen in the game, a giant brass monster who took many a concept and strategem to finally defeat.

In case that’s not clear (and why should it be), what I mean is that I had to think up and try many different ways to kill the fucking thing until I found omne that worked.

So right now I am in that special kind of mental state I used to find myself in after a very mind labor intensive exam. It is a lot like being drunk, only without the being relaxed and happy part. My brain is fried like baloney and I feel sort of like I just staggered out of an area hit by a bomb during the Blitz and I am still reeling from the shock.

So I figured this would be a great time for me to blog.

Hey, might as well make the most of this rare mental state. It takes a lot of strain to put me here and I am guessing (hoping) that my writing will be amusingly different if I write while I am feeling so mind blasted and slap happy.

Take that, Happy!

(SFX : Face being slapped, male voice saying “Ow!”)

Never could stand that guy.

Eventually, the adrenaline portion of this mental state will wear off and I will take a very deep nap. Right now, no matter how wigged out I feel, I could not sleep without the intervention of a very heavy sedative or a very heavy hammer.

Wouldn’t it be great if that’s all it actually took, just like in the cartoons? JUst a bomp over the head with a hammer and you get a little raised bump on the head and some deep peaceful sleep.

It would put the sleeping pill people out of business, unless they got in on the burgeoning new nap hammer business.

It was a pretty good quest mod and I got some pretty sweet gear out of it. The gear would be a lot sweeter if I was a warrior instead of being a mage, but whatever.

It’s the thought that counts. Plus, I can kill dragons with lightning, so that’s a plus.

This mental state is notg entirely unpleasant. There’s a certain giddiness that comes with being so mentally blasted. Perhaps that’s the sort of state the casual users of various stupefying chemicals enjoy.

Myself, I am too goddamned paranoid and controlling tofully enjoy being temporarily stupid. My sense of safety, such as it is, is dependent on keeping my wits about me  and constantly trying to look in all directions at once in order to see danger coming in time to deal with it.

It’s no way to live, really. But it’s the only one I know.

I would be way better off if I could relax, trust the world, and free myself of this nightmare burden of anticipation. It would makes me a much calmer and happier and saner person if I could change that fundamental sense of how safe I am variable that got harshly set to “never ever ever safe” when I wasn’t even old enough to cross the street by myself.

I did it anyway, of course, but I wasn’t supposed to.

But I don’t know if it’s even physically possible to alter that variable. Like I keep saying, between birth and the sage of five, we acquire most of our adult brain mass. That means that trauma from that period can become part of the actual physical structure of the brain itself, and that’s not something you can fix with a nice long chat about our feelings over a hot cup of tea.

The best that I can hope for is to either get used to feeling unsafe and habituate myself towards sanity that way, or continue to lead the life of the recluse because I can only truly feel safe is when there are no people around to threaten me.

Not even my loved ones.

People have told me that part of the appeal of bondage play is the level of trust involved, and that would explain why I could never, ever, EVER be a part of it. I don’t trust anyone enough to let them tie me up. Nobody. I can’t even conceive of someone I would trust that much. It’s simply impossible.

God, the adrenaline is wearing off and I really want to nap now. But I have 200 more words to write and there’s a pizza on the way. So that’s not gonna happen.

UIt’s a lot like my inability to believe there is someone who can help me. Obviously that’s not true, because I have improved greatly under Doctor Costin’s care.

Therapy works, folks. It just takes a long time.

What I truly mean when I say nobody can help me is that there is nobody who can do it by being stronger than I am and thus being true authority to me. I have been mentally stronger and faster than those around me for my whole fucking life. The only people who could stand up to me enough to make me feel safe were both women with strong personalities who were tough enough to handle me.

But I was a kid then. I pnly got bigger and stronger as I aged. Now I literally cannot imagine someone being strong of mind and spirit and heart enough to make me feel like I was not all alone in the world and that someone was watching over me.

And I need that. I need it in order to finally finish my childhood and grow up.

But it just plain ain’t gonna happen.

So I am officially fucked.

And not in the good way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling fairly up today. The dark shadow of depression lurks eternally, of course, but right now it seems content to lurk grumpily in a corner with its best friend, anxiety.

Honestly, it’s like they are the same person.

Should I have capitalized them because I characterized them? Nah.

Yesterday, as you know, I went to Costco with Joe. And while I really should have eaten lunch before leaving the house, and the resulting blood sugar crash fucked me up good for at least twelve hours, some good did come of it.

First of all, I saved a lot of money by buying a 1100 mg bag of Hostess Munchie Mix.

This bad boy right here.

I had never seen such a huge sized bag of something I like. It’s hard to describe the feeling a fat person gets when they see a larger size of something they like than they have ever seen before, but it’s practically spiritual.

My eyes must have been as big as a kid’s on Xmas morning when they see that bike shaped present when I saw it. I was truly in awe. It was SO BIG.

And then I read the price and it was on sale for only $4.50 or so, and I was like “SOLD!” because that is exactly how much I would pay for a beg 1/5 the size at 7-11.

I might not have gone for it if it had been a single thing instead of a mix. No matter how much I like something, I would probably be sick of it before I finished a back that mondo huge. And that might well happen here, too.

I mean, to this day I can’t hack Jolly Ranchers, and that’s because I made a similar mistake at a Costco in the USA when I lived in Silly Con Valley.

And I used to love them! I’ve always liked hard candy (always nice to have something to suck on) and when JR’s came out, they were the hard candy that tasted a lot more like actual fruit than the usual crap.

I was an instant fan.

But then we got a big bag of them from Costco, with Dhugal telling me that it was a dumb idea because I would be sick of them long before we finished the bag, and he was, of course, totally right.

I barely even made a dent in the thing.

So I could be setting myself up with something similar with the Munchie Mix, but I don’t really care. There are lots of things to eat in this big ol crazy world, and if I ruin one for myself, I can always go on to something else.

And honestly, it would be worth it for the epiphanous moment I had when seeing it anyhow. It was amazing.

I also got a 36-can case of Diet Coke in order to help myself cut down on the stuff.

That might seem counterintuitive, to put it mildly, but hear me out.

See, I have had a 2L bottle a day Diet Coke habit for a while now. This would be consumed in roughly 1L portions as a beverage to go with a meal.  I would drink it from my big 1.8L 7-11 cup.

The other 800 ml would be ice.

But lately I have been wondering whether these large caffiene infusions are causing my high background anxiety levels and this feeling of being hunted and haunted and generally not at all happy and calm that I have been having for a while.

That’s what tends to happen when you give a stimulant to a depressive. In theory, it would give us the energy and stimulation to get up and go get the exercise we need to break us out of our funk and make us happy again.

And if you believe that, I have some real estate on Mars I want to sell you.

To be a depressive is to have one’s motivational system clogged with bad brain chemicals. This imbues us with incredible inertia and cannot be overcome by adding energy to the mixture because all that does is get blocked by the clogs and ending up getting backed up into our default repository for excess energies, anxiety.

It’s less black and white than that, of course, but you get the basic idea.

So the only time it really makes sense to add a stimulant to my system is when I am about to do something that can make use of that excess energy… like blogging.

So having some Diet Coke while I blog makes sense.

Other times, not so much. As much fun as I have in Skyrim, playimng it does not exactly put a lot of strain on my brain or my body and so adding energy is kind of dumb.

Which brings us back to my Diet Coke habit. By getting the cans and limiting myself to one 355 ml can per meal, I can cut my 2L a day habit down to 1065 ml a day habit, and that’s if I have a can with every meal, which I probably will not.

And the thing is, I know I will not feel the loss, because for me at least, there seems to be something magical about a can of pop that makes it seem like a big drink, more than enough to accompany a meal.

I think the magic must be that drinking from a can restricts your rate of intake compared to drinking from a glass, and that makes it seem like more.

Whatever the mechanism, I love it, and so I should be able to cut back on the stuff and maybe be a less anxious person.

Then I can go back to being depressed! Which is just as bad, but a lot less work.

Seriously, though, if this works, I might try to wean myself off of the caffiene entirely and move into drinking something healthy like fruit juice with my meals.

That way, I still get my flavour fix, and healthy nutrients and hydration as well.

Well, after writing that exciting update, I need a nap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Good news, everyone! Tonight I am blogging while in the middle of a low blood sugar incident! A truly triumphant first.

Don’t worry, I have eaten, everything will be fine. Right now, I am stuck impatiently waiting for my metabolism to do its thing and put this right.

Otherwise, I would not be blogging. I mean, my actions are not always the wisest but I at least know how to prioritize.

Most of the time, anyhow.

Right now, I mostlty feel cold. I have cold spots all over my body, especially in the hands and feet. I also have a certain telltale shivery feeling inside and I am trembling slightly. Emotionally, I feel cold and vunerable, and the voice in my head berating me for being so goddamned stupid is really getting on my nerves.

I really neeed to shut that guy up. He’s not helping.

Had a really good therapy session today. Very productive. My therapist absolutely nailed it when he said that the reason I have found it impossible to promote my own work is that I would first have to value it.

I would have to be prepared to say “This is awesome stuff and you should read it! (or watch it, or listen to it, or whatever)” instead of waiting for external validation before actually showing it to people.

I trust that the issue with that is obvious. You don’t get the reward before you earn it!

Come on, carbs, make me feel better already! I just gave my body every level of carb from whole wheat bread to chocolate pudding. I should be feeling better by now.

Instead, I feel cold and sluggish and scared. Did I finally fuck up so bad it does me permanent harm? And what if the answer is no? What will I have learned?

Not to skip lunch then go to Costco, I suppose.

Joe was off work today due to leftover vacation time, so I was able to go with him to Costco and pick out some things for myself.

And you know what? I’m a funny guy. I was riffing off all kinds of products. I really should gwith a descreet digital camera and capture that shit on video.

But I can’t think about that right now because the very thought of the work involved is making me feel sick to my stomach.

Had to beg off the Paragon meeting tonight. Which sucks. I hate the feeling that thuings are going on without me. It feels too much like being left behind.

Oh, and I keep fading in and out of concentration. I just stared in the general direction of the bathroom for three minuites because my mind was following a tangent (never could resist a tan gent) and I kind of forgot I was doing something.

And what hurts the most when that kind of thing happens with me is that moment when my mind has forced a hard reboot in order to get me back to reality and I suddenly realize what has been going on.

That shit’s scary, man. Like fading out while driving a car, then suddenly snapping back into focus and realizing you could have died a million ways.

Fading out of awareness then suddenly snapping back into consciousness has happened a lot in my life. I have always had the kind of mind that wanders if left unattended, and that inward tide never stops trying to pull me deeper and deeper into my own thoughts.

And I am so scared of passing the event horizon of that black hole. That’s why I am always running to stand still. It takes so much energy just to figght that crushing gravity field that it leaves percious little for other things like living.

I guess you would call my black hole “depression”. It’s also the force that powers my endless grinding and compression and purification of what I know to produce a clear view of the truth,

I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not, though.

I think I would bebetter off deluded.

Oh well. Some of us are born to be visionaries and the power and curse of the visionary is to see everything very clearly, as it really is, without any filters or cushions to protect the visionary’s poor cold heart.

We’re the ones who take the philosopher’s route – better miserable than believing in lies. And there is a certain hermit nobility and honor to that. The one who chooses the harsher path, and so on.

But at the end of the day, no matter how far I can see or how big the picture I see becomes, I am still only human, and I want to be happy.

Or at least comfortable.

But delusion (sometimes called faith) is by its very nature impossible to embrace consciously. You cannot say “I choose to believe this lie” because you already know it’s a lie and the mind iwll not accept that level of falsification.

Then again, there’s various levels of “real”. Take religion. Billions worldwide believe in an afterlife, but few want to go there right now.

Some beliefs are true enough. Enough to get the job done and solve the problem. Resolve that inner conflict. Answer that pressing question about life.

So hard to focus. Just 114 more words.

And as hard as it is for us brainy liberal types to imagine, that is good enough for most people. For them, the ultimate Truth is not their highest priority. Their highest priority is to get through life by living it, not stop to ponder where it’s all going and what it all means. and what is truly truly true.

Well I guess thjat’s it from me for now. It’s been a day of ups and downs, shally we say, and right now, I am going down… for a nap.

That should give my body time to process what I have eaten and correct the imbalance and put things right.

And when I wake up, I will feel… awful.

But in a normal way.

Fucking sleep apnea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just woke up after staying up till 8:30 am playing Skyrim, so forgive me if today’a magic missive is a wee bit more rambling and incoherent than usual.

If that’s possible.

I realize recently that this habit I have fallen into of playing Skyrim for eight hours straight when everyone else is asleep basically means I spend half my waking hours (at least) playing the damned thing.

That’s a sobering thought. It’s one thing to know you are addicted and quite another to look at the hard data that proves it.

I can’t help but think of all the human potential that I am wasting. Here I am, brain and talent the size of a planet (and a fat one at that), and I spend most of my time doing something utterly unproductive.

What I need is some crazy new porject. And I have one in mind but it’s not quite fully baked yet. I know the basics of what it will be about and what it will be like, but it hasn’t coalesced into a mental picture yet. At some pointm critical mass will be reached and it will jump the synaptic gap from ideas and notions to something I am wildly enthusastic about and raring to do, and that’s’ when it will become a reality.

Until then, all I can do is stay busy while the charge accumulates and gently shepherd the process forward.

Every creator worships the same God  : their muse. Their process. Creativity is a proicess that defies direct control, and so we are left not so much controlling it as managing it and trying to make sure it has what it needs while staying out of its way.

It’s like being your own inner agent, in a way. Or parent.

I think that’s part of the reason why we tend to be such a neurotic and impulsive bunch too. Even in the relatively cerebral world of writing (as opposed to the more right-brain arts like painting or music), to be creative one must have direct access to one’s emotional core as possible because that’s where the raw stuff of inspiration comes from, and therefore that’s the wellspring of our creativity.

PErhaps that is also why we tend to be a shy and reclusive bunch. You have to have some serious alone time to clear your mind enough to hear that all important inner voice. Also, it’s us urban hermits who have trouble expressing ourselves in the usual ways that end up having to do it through art.

And that means that all the energies that usually would express themselves widely and overtly are squeezed through the narrow apeture of our talent instead. To us, our talent is far more than a way to pay the rent.

And that’s good, because it rarely ever does.

No, our talent is our escape valve for all the repressed feelings and pent up passions we have so much trouble expressing in our normal lives.

Or at least that’s how it works for me.

This little blog o’ mine is my vital link to the world outside my dimly lit garret. In it, I can escape myself for a bit as I, quite timidly and quietly, reach out to the world that so terrifies me and offer it something of myself.

And seeing as I am the sort of person who blogs about his experiences with his latest butt toy, it’s often more of myself than the world really wants to know.

In that regard : I seem to be getting better at using it. I suppose you get better at anything if you do it enough. Had a lovely time with it last night in bed.

And this pleases me not just because it felt wonderful and not just because I need all the physical pleasure I can get in my metaphyrical little life in order to ground me in reality and remind me I am alive, but also because I think some of my depression comes from a vast unsatisfied need for sex/romance/kicks, and therefore I would be a happier person if I could express someof those vital energies more fully.

Does it seem weird when I talk about such intimate things so clinically? Because it’s honestly the only way I know how to do it. There have been people in my life who have accused me of using “fancy language” to “show off how smart I am”, but I can honestly say that it’s my native tongue.

Everything else is an act of translation.

It’s also the only way I know to achieve the sort of message density I need in order to stand any sort of chance of getting what is in me out. Simpler language doesn’t have the degree of nuance and intricacy needed for the sorts of things I need to express.

No Hemingway here.

It’s partgicularly true for this blog, because this is the place where I express myself most directly, and so I am always articulating the previously unarticulated, and need the full range of language in order to stand a chance of doing it.

When I write prose, which is high density by nature, I can been less high-falutin’ in my language. Medium-falutin’ at most. Prose requires me to express myself in a different direction and drains those mental energies of mine in a different way.

This blog is where I spill my guts.

Prose is where I dream out loud.

You use different skills.

I would probably be better off if I wrote more prose. It takes more out of me and that is a good thing. Writing my book shaped thing last November was a lot of fun and made me a calmer than usual person, and that’s always good.

But it’s hard to stay motivated when none of it really goes anywhere. By that I mean that nobody but my beloved loved ones will ever read it. And while I appreciate their attention to my words more than even my words can express, I want more.

And that means opening that door and letting the world in.

That’s my Holy Grail now.

That’s where I will find my home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.