As usual, I had many great ideas for tonight’s blog entry mere hours ago and now I can’t think of any of them. So if the title of this entry is “So now what?”, it means I either didn’t think of one or forgot to change it.

C’est la vie.

The anti-Skyrim pressure within me continues to grow. For a long time now, there has been a rebellion against my Skyrim lifestyle brewing and gaining support in my mind, and I have done nothing to suppress it.

After all,. it’s the voice that cries out, with a voice that rrows louder and more comfident every day, that there has to be more of life than this and we are in pain because of the limitations this Skyrim shift puts on our lives.

I, of course, agree. But I also know that I have to let this thing run its course. More sooner than later, the dam will break and the new mind will dawn across my ice-ravaged landscape, and I will be washed clean by the water thus released.

Or at the very least, I will get to the point where I played a variety of video games, and did othing things too, like making videos and music and stuff.

Right now, I fele like Skyrim is a kind of purgatory for me. Or maybe it’s my bardo bridging the gap between two states of being for me.

I toil and toil, and most of me is happy.

But the percentage that is unhappy grows every day, and one of these days,. I will finally be will and truly sick of the damned game, and I will uninstall it and never want to see it again for the rest of my life.

I feel like that day is coming soon. I have already had nostalgia for another, similar game called Witcher 3, which I purchased and played to death years ago.

It’s sitting there on my Steam account, ready for me to install and play once more, and it has a lot of advantages over Skyrim. The battle mechanics are more fun, the plot is rich and varied, the graphics are way better, the world is amazingly dense with genuine content, and most importantly. there is no custom character building.

You are Geralt. That’s it. End of story. One of the main things that has kept me in Skyrim’s clutches for so long is that there are so many potential character builds, and each one makes the game fresh again because it strongly affects everything about how you play that character and thus how you interact with the game.

Take my current character. He’s a mage. He fights with spells. That makes him very powerful but it also means that, along the route I am taking, wearing armor  (and thus increasing your skill in that armor type every time you get hit) is not an option, and so my guy is very powerful, but also very vulnerable.

PRetty much any idiot with a sword can kill me if he is lucky enough to get to me before I can take him down with my fireballs.

And there is no perfect solution for that. My guy can summon demon-ish creatures called Dremora to act as his bodyguard, but there are limits to how much protection you can  get from one or two creatures.

Especially when there is no way to tell them “No, don’t chase that fleeing enemy or go darting off after the first enemty you see, STAY WITH ME, damn it. ”

There’s armor spells, too, but they are nowhere near as effective as actual armor. They, at best, make it so that the aforementioned idiot with a sword has to hit me two or three times to kill me, and that gives me time to turn him into a charcoal briquette.

God, I love fire magic. I am such a latent pyro. The other two options for offensive magic are ice and electricity, and ice sucks dog taint because so many creatures are resistant or immune to it and electricity is awesome – theres’s no qay for shooting lightning from your fingers like you’re Darth Motherfucking Sidious  NOT to be awesome – but it doesn’t please me like fire magic does.

Anyhow. Back to the pklot.

My point (Surprise! There’s a point!) is that when I play a character lik emy mage, I have to be cagey and alert and ready to zotz someone with the speed and accuracy of a quick draw artist at all times.

Then take the polar opposite : the Big Thumping Monster Build.

That’s when you play a character who specializes in huge weapons, thick armor,. and very little else.

You hit things very hard until they die.

That’s it. You need to have some caution early in the game, but once you have some good armor and the skill to use it well, you are pretty much a tank and can more or less walk through even tough dungeons barely having to break your stride.

It’s a totally different experience. And that means that when I get bored of playing one kind of character, I can make a different kind of character and play it,and boom everything is fresh and exciting again.

Then add in the effect of nearly 30K mods that change the game in ways both subtle (like the one that makes enemies glow so I am less likely to fireball an ally) or profound (ones that are practically entire new games), you can see how this game has had me in its spell for so long.

It’s one game that can be played thousands of unique, distinct ways.

It’s a wonder I ever come up for air.

But I do. And some day soon, I will surface for good, and unintall the goddamned thing, and that will be it. I will have overcome it for good.

Or at least for long enough to get another steady gig.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(TRIGGER WARNING : Roy Roger’s horse just broke out of jail and is believed to be armed and dangerous… )

(REAL TRIGGER WARNING : I am going to talk about gross personal health sutff tonight, so if that kind of thing is a proble for you, spin on, my friend. It’s OK!)

I am not feeling very good right now. I am suffering an attack of… whatever it is that meakes me have a headache, be nauseous, feel a weird feeling in the puit of my bowels, and have a strong dull ache in my testicles, all at the same time.

I’ve been here many times before. My theory is that it is some kind of inflammatory response to something. possibly allergic in nature, because that is the only thing I can think of that could set off all those different symptoms all at once.

One by one, they can easily be explained via my usual bullshit. The headache comes from stuffed up sinuses, a plugged up nose, and clogged eustachian tubes. I deal with that frequently, mostly via taking a combination antihistamine and sinus medication and doing my best to keep ears and nose clear.^[1]

Yes, that means I pick my nose. Deal with it. It’s that or lose like 50 percent of my air intake capacity of my nostrils, and I am not a mouth-breather, so that’s kind of important Plus, it feels good, especially when my sinuses and ears are clogged and freeing up my nostril lets out all that tension all at once.

It’s quite euphoric.

.So basically, that issue boils down to poor drainage in my skull.

The nausea, well, I have a sensitive stomach which can get tied into knots by tension that I am not even aware of. And sometimes that tension is not caused by any one thing, but rather it’s an accumulation of unresolved minor stresses that are harmless on their own but add to that stored tension in the tummy until I end up with a knot in my gut that could crush coal into diamonds.

As for the bowel weirdness, that is part IBS and part the whole stomach knot thing making this worse further down the line. Because I am an old pro at handlimng these situations now, I don’t panic like I did when I was younger and therefore the problem does not escalate like it once did and land me in the hospital because imy lower intestine is spasming so hard that I see stars and it feels like I am Mel Gibson getting his guts reeled out at the end of Braveheart.

So while these attacks are not fun,  I am always comforted by the knowledge that I can remain calm and in control through the whole thing and that I know a lot of different ways to attack the problem and by opposing, end it.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, my testicles.

The ache there is a lot like “blue balls”, our charming vernacular’s phrase for the deep ache that males get when they haven’t ejaculated for a while and the semen has therefore accumulated in their testicles, causing them to swell painfully.

Do the ladies have anything equivalent? Is there some part of their body that aches when they haven’t gotten laid recently? I am not talking about horniness, that’s on a different track than this. I am talking about a literal physical body ache that gets worse and worse until you take matters into your own hands or find a suitable playmate.

I am guessing that they do not. But they get menstrual cramps and all THAT bullshit, so I think we men still come out ahead on that.

After all, you can’t relieve menstrual cramps via masturbating. Well, orgasms do help, supposedly, but not for very long.

Or so I have heard.

One last thing about blue balls : they make me nauseous, which is a bit of a problem, because it’s very hard to masturbate to completion when you feel like you might puke.

Anyhow, it’s a lot like blue balls, but the sudden onset along with the other issues suggests that it is more than that. Blue balls plus, if you will.

And it seems like it is also tied in with the stomach knotting thing and especially the nausea. As all men who have been kicked in the junk at least once (and that’s most of us) know. problems with your testicles can make you nauseous real fast.

So all these areas are prone to problems of their own for yours truly. But when they all go off at once, I feel like there must be some phenomenon affecting them all.

Hence my inflammatory response theory. It really feels like, when this happeneds. everything in my body contracts and suddenly there is not enough room in me for the usual amount of stuff and I am in deep doodoo.

Insert your own poop/IBS joke here.

Luckily, like I said, I have many techniques for dealing with these attacks. I clear my ears and nose, I drink small sips of water in case the problem is a clog down below that needs a little moisture to get things flowing again, I check to see if I am cold or shaking in case it’s actually a low blood sugar thing, I make sure that I am not sitting in a way that squooshes my testicles, and so forth and so on

Thatt means that 9 times out of ten, I can slay the beast, and get more the brief but marvelous endorphine high and a sense of accomplishment and victory.

Not bad for someone who is not particularly competent in other areas.

I guess with the right incentive, anything is possible.

Even me getting my shit together.

So to speak.

I will talk to you nce people again tomorrow.

I’ve been having some bad moments with my relationship with time lately.

What happens is this :I will be doing something I do once a week, and suddenly it’s as though all the times I have done that thing before telescope into one overwhelming moment and I have to yank myself back to the present before my mind crashes.

It is like deja vu, and I am a litle deja vu prone, but unlike deja vu, which makes me feel like I am going backwards in time to the beginning of the loop (nuuuuu!), this phenomenon makes me feel as if time has stopped and I am trapped in an eternal and imperturbable NOW (NUUUU…no,  that’s not enough. FUUUUUUUCK!)

It’s extremely scary and leaves me feeling alienated and weirded out. It happened just before I sat down to blog and eat, and that’s how I ended up talking about it now.

I was picking out the clotghes I wanted to wear this afternoon and it reminded me that I had done laundry last Sunday at around this time and then I thought “Wow, has it really been a week since I did that? ” and then the telescoping thing happened and I felt that nothing really happens and time was collapsing into this one crystalline moment that would go on forever because time no longer had any meaning.

I am positive that if I had a different kind of mind, this would have been a sublime moment of divine transcendence where the illusion of change slips away and I get a glimpse of the eternal cosmic truth of reality and am thus enightened.

Instead, it just freakes me the fuck out. Guess I am a tad too rational and left-brained for that kind of thing.

More’s the pity. I could use some goddamned transcendence. Instead. I habve to take the much much longer rational route, where I have to figure things out in a way that makes sense to me instead of being able to transcend the need and go directly to the new understanding without needing for it all to fit together.

Thinking can seem faster than feeling, but it’s not. It’s thinking that takes forever.

Anyhow. Back to time. I figure this eternal now business is the latest (and strangest) manifestation of how time seems to go faster the older you get. This is because your sense of time grows longer for your entire life. We go from being toddlers for whom there is only “now” and “not now” to children for whom five minutes seems like an eternity to teens who think being thirty means you’re really old to being young adults who feel like they have an infinite and unbounded future ahead of us to middle aged people who feel the death clock of mortality ticking for the first time in their lives to old people who feel whole months slipping away from them to ancient ones who can’t remember who won the last election because at this point in their lives, they all kind of blur together into one.

Wow. I probably should have expressed that as a list or a timeline or something, because that is one very long sentence.

But fuck it. Makes sense to me, anyway. I have no head for graphics.

This growing sense of time, of how long a moment is, can make it seem like time is speeding up and that can be very scary and depressing. You feel like everything is changing too fast and that by the time you get used to the next thing, it will be obsolete too, just like you, and it can seem like you are un a runaway train headed straight over the edge of a cliff to crash directly into death.

That is a very bad feeling. I know this because I have felt it. It’s an illusion, of course. Days still have the same number of seconds in them as the day you were born, and nothing has actually changed in the outside world. The change is purely subjective.

And that helps. When I get to feeling that way, I repeat my little rationalist mantra of “it’s all an illusion, nothing has really changed” in order to steady myself.

But such rational coping mechanisms can, at best, only offer the cold comfort of their bright but chilly embrace.

It can keep you from going creepy. It can even, on a good day, keep you from freaking out and having a panic attack.

But it can’t truly make you feel better.

That’s a lesson I ought to remember. I need a lot more than cold comfort if I am to get over my past and become more whole and strong enough to stand on my own.

I will need to learn to comfort myself with something much warmer than reason.

I will need to learn how to give myself a hug.

I had nobody to model that behaviour for me. Mine was an extremely chilly childhood. There was a lot of light in that household, because we are all very bright, but there was very little in the way of emotional warmth.

And I think we all suffered because of it. Me most of all because I was isolated from my siblings by time and birth order and being a surprise, but we all felt it.

But we couldn’t see it. We didn’t know that it was the cause of some of our suffering. It was all too easy to blame my father and his rages for all our suffering. He was the obvious villain and so we blamed him.

But it wasn’t his fault that there was so little warmth. In face, this intellectual chilliness might have been part of why he acted like he did.

It came from my mother. And it was subtle – it’s not like she’s some kind of aloof ice queen or detached academic. She’s a very warm and sweet person.

But thr truth is, underneath it all, she is uncomfortable with overly emotional situations and likes us kids best when we are being bright students for her to teach.

And I was the brightest sudent of them all.

No wonder I am such a wreck.

I was emotionally malnourished right from the start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

‘s been a tad chaotic.

But I think I am handling it well. Rolling with the punches, so to speak.

See, last night, Joe told me that due to the teachers’ professional development day at his school today, he and his co-workers were able to talk their supervisor into letting them work a 2 pm to 10 pm shift instead of his usual 4 pm to midnight shift.

That was fine. Normally Felicity, Joe and I get together after Joe gets of work on Fridays, so this just meant we got to start hanging out a couple of hours earlier.

Then today, in the middle of the afternoon, I get a Facebook message from Felicity telling me that due to today’s snowiness^[1], Joe was actually getting off work at 6 pm instead of 10 pm.

That was a fairly large curveball. I do not have a good history when it comes to handling large changes like that. In my heart of hearts, I really wish they did not happen because they always upset me emotionally.

I don’t do sudden.

But whatever. I am getting better and part of that is getting better at rolling with the punches and dealing with change.

Specifically, change that I did not initiate myself. if i am the one changing things, I can handle it just fine, because I dealt with the psychological impact of the change as part of my decision to make the change.

There’s probably some brilliant mind hack for my depression lurking in there soimewhere, but that will have to wait.

Because it wasn’t until 5 pm when Joe’s arriving home an hour early jarred my brain into realizing that I hadn’t blogged yet.

This was Test #2, the first one being the change from 10 pm to 6 pm. Could I handle this potentially panic/anxierty/depression inducing news? Could I pull myself together and master the situation!

Yup! After letting myself recover from the shock for a few moments, then got up, told Joe about the situation, informed him that I would be ready by 7 pm, he said that was OK by him, and I came back to the computer, sat down, and started typing.

And so far, it’s going swimmingly. This blogging thing is way easier when I am just relating the events of the day in my own unique style ^[1]. The words just occur to me at a natural speed.

It’s too badm then, that most of the time, I have absolutely nothing to write about. Nobody wants to read a blog where most entries read “I played Skyrim, ate, played Skyrim, ate, played Skyrim, ate, and then I went to sleep. ”

That’s why this blog is not a diary. It’s a lot like one, but it’s not one, because I rarely actually write down the events of the day. Because there aren’t any.

So instead, I blog out the contents of my head, which are always dynamic, vibrant, compelling, interestlng, scintillating, fascinating, and like, really smart, yo.

At least to me. Your mileage invariably varies.

One actual thing that has been happening with me that is rather a big deal is that I have been investigating the local craiglist “men seeking men” section looking for a “hookup”, as the kids today call it.

For the tragically dense, I will translate : I’m looking for a guy to fuck.

Or be fucked by. I am flexible.

So far, I have no actual play-dates planned. I am in discussion with some dudes via email about getting together for a (hopefully VERY) good time, but nothing solid has yet to develop, largely due to the usual headache of trying to make schedules match up.

But there is one thing that happened that I would like to relate here because it hurt and made me depressed for a little while and, in general, really sucked.

I found this one fellow with whom I shared an interest in a rather specific and unspeakable kind of gay sex^[3] and all this week we have been exchanging emails and getting all pumped up about all the stuff we would do when we got together and then, out of the blue, he asks for a “body pic”.

Uh oh. So I sent him this picm which is my fave pic of me of all time because it captures who I really am, and not just my appearance. .

Lodge brother Raoyal Order water buffalo!

Aaaand he emails me back to tell me I am “not his type”.

Here’s what he said : “Sorry, you are not really my type. I am into muscle bears and hot daddies. I like lumberjack men.”

Now I might not have a lot of muscle mass, but I am a bear, and I am certainly old enough (and paternal enough) to be someone’s hot daddy, and the last time I checked, there’s no rule that lumberjacks actuall have to be skinny millennial lubersexual to be a lumberjack. In fact. I imagine them as being quite burly.

So either this fellow is not just pathetically shallow but thoughtlessly cruel about it ^[4], or he got cold feet and used the lamest and most hurtful of methods to cover it.

I’d understand if he got cold feet and told me.. What we were planning to do is not normal and extremely taboo, and horniness can only take you so far over the line before your conditioning kicks in.

Not for me, of course. I’m a fearless freak who only keeps thing quiet in order to spare himself from negative social consequences and spare the feelings of others.

But for most people.

So if that’s the real story, to hell with that guy. He didn’t have to hurt me in order to get out of the situation.

And to hell with him if he’s just a size-ist snob, too.

I mean, it’s not like it’s the fat we were planning to use as an interface anyway.

But oh well. Even in the world of random hookups, people would rather be shot dead than have sex with a fat dude.

I will find my perverted Prince Charming eventually.

And then we’re gonna have us a might good time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[2]] Which one reviewer described as ”like you combined Martin Luther, Oscar Wilde, Douglas Adams, and a television permanently tuned to the 1980s, then left it outside in the cold until it got depression. ” [[2]]

Asked my Facebook pals a simple question :

“Is it possible for one’s point of view to be too objective?”

Should have added “for one’s own good”, because that is what I was getting at. As patient readers know, Ihave been ruminating on the idea that a capacity for self-delusion may well be necessary for a person’s psychological wellbeing and that my relentless drive towards the truth in all things, regardless of the damage to my ego or my comfort or really any human consideration, may do me far more harm than good.

It is a harsh and inhuman thing, this neverending drive towards objective truth.  It permits no fault, no weakness, and no forgiveness. It has no mercy and no tolerance and there is absolutely no chance that it will permit the slighest deviation from an arrow straight path torwards the truth for mere human consideration.

It’s my brutal truth machine, and to be honest, sometimes I am afraid of it. Because it hurts me. A lot. And yet, I know there’s nothing I can do about it because. at this point in my life, I cannot imagine how the system could be changed.

It’s impossible to consciously start fooling yourself. The emotional shock absorbers (that one presumably gets from proper socialization) need to be installed early, when one is young enough to incorporate them into one’s being subconsciously or it ain’t gonna happen. I’m afraid.

Perhaps that is one of the hidden functions of religion. I can certainly see how having a sort of escape hatch from reality which can be construed to be whatever you need at the moment could be enormously beneficial.

The constant, benevolent prescence of an omnipotent alpha male to act as your perfect father figure alone would do a lot to keep someone properly glued together.

But I don’t believe in magic,and I doubt I ever will. For me, reality is not nearly that plastic, and so I have no bolthole I can dive into when reality gets too rough.

I’m stuck with the truth, no matter what.

It amazes me to think that most people have a brain which holds their own happiness as the highest priority instead of the truth. They don’t know this, of course. If they did, it wouldn’t work. But somewhere in the deep layers of their psyches is a psychological subroutine that can actually adjust their person reality in order to keep them happy.

And sure, it’s easy to point out examples of where that is a bad thing. Trump’s narcissism makes a good (and disturbing) example. His reality-adjusting subroutine is active to the point of him being actively delusional. Whatever gratifies is ego is true, and whatever disagrees with it is false. Period.

But narcissistic personality disorder does not disprove the utility of this subroutine of mine any more than schizophrenia disproves the utlity of imagination.

My assertion of the existence of toxic objectivity is very interesting from a cultural point of view, because Western thinking is very much not down with the idea.

There can’t be such a thing as too much knowledge or too much truth in the Western point of view. In a sense, we are all supposed to be constantly seeking the truth. The Western model imagines each citizen as a rugged truth-seeking invidual, and what truth we find is viewed as an individual rather than a group effort.

Things are quite different in the East.

I was talking about the subject in therapy yesterday, and I could tell my therapist was struggling with the concept and with the urge to object. Toxic objectivity is a concept that goes against the very foundations of Western thought, and this is doubly true for those of us in the intellectual class.

Truth is what all us brainy types are supposed to be seeking, one way or another. It is our sole univeral good. More truth is always better because it makes us “better informed” and gives us a more “realistic” view of reality.

And how can that be wrong?

After all, the person who sees that their house is on fire and calls 911 is clearly at an advantage over the person who ignores it or pretends it isn’t happening, right?

So this notion of toxic objectivity is counterintuitive, to put it mildly.

And it is hard to talk about because the mechanism is hidden so well. Nobody wants to admit, even to themselves, that they are not perceiving reality correctly or their self-esteem is based on what amounts to cheating in one’s own favour. That sort of thing could cripple a person’s self-worth or even cause a total psychological breakdown.

That;s why I try to be very careful about when and how I ‘truth’ people. Were I less aware of the consequences of my actions or less willing to take responsibility for them, I would recklessly attack “delusion” wherever I saw it, smugly sure that I was making the world a better place by reducing its bullshit quotient.

But I am neither that self-righteous or that ignorant of the realities of people’s inner lives. The truth (ha) is that people only need so much truth in their lives.

Sure, they need to know if their house is on fire, but they don’t necessari;ly need to know that their combover isn’t fooling anyone, let alone that Jesus isn’t real.

Back to the mechanism being so well hidden. It’s so well hidden that even I, with my Hannibal Lecter level perceptions. didn’t consciously realize it was there until recently.

All my life, I have known people believe things which are demonstrably untrue and that everyone can see is a lie. And this upset and intrigued me because it was so different from how I thought.

But it has taken me thirty years of observation and analysis to figure out why these people had these belief which, to me at least, were obviously false.

It’s not that they chose to fool themselves. That’s logically impossible.

It’s that they need to do it. And the trickster in their head does the rest.

And because they can. and I can’t, they are healthy people who have made a life for themselves. and I am just some big fat depressed slug who plays Skyrim.

I’m broken as fuck, y’all.

And some days it really gets me down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

“Could you repeat that?” said Timbo.

“You heard me. ” said Alan “Shark” Templeton, relishing, as always, the job of being the bearer of bad news. “Nobody gets in. Ever. The whole thing is some sick fuck’s idea of a joke There’s no Club Fruvous, just some asshole sitting there watching us idiots stand around in the rain for hours waiting to get in to a nonexistant club. It’s all bullshit. ”

“Where did you hear this?” asked Laura “”Lynx” McPherson.

“Hear it? “: said Shark. “Whaddaya mean, hear it. I didn’t have to hear it from anyone. I just figured it out. You know, by thinking. You should try it sometime, it’s fun. ”

“Hey, fuck you, Shark. ” said Lynx.

“With whose dick?” he replied, grinning the predator grin that earned him his nickname.

“Well explain this, Shark.. ” said Danny “Tiger” Thompson while unconsciously moving in between Shark and Lynx.  “If nobody gets in, how come the line moves?”

“It moves because people give up and leave, idiot. ” said Shark. “Which is what we would do if we had any sense. ”

“You first. ” said Manuela “Sable” Guiterrez.

“And miss a chance to watch you idiots make fools of yourselves in public? Never. ”

“You’re doing the same thing we are, moron. ” said Troy “Bull” Santini.

“Yeah, Bull, but for me it’s different, because… ” began Shark.

“Excuse me. ” said an exquisitely dressed middle aged lady ahead of them in line. “But you’re wrong. People do get in. In fact, almost everyone who makes it to the front of the line gets in. I should know. I’ve been in five times. ”

“But if people are getting in,. ” said Lynx, “then how come the line moves so slow?”

“Because once they get in, people don’t want to leave. ” said the lady.

“It’s that good? ” said Bull.

“Better. ” said the lady. “It’s not like the other clubs. Everyone there is warm and friendly and funny. The whole vibe of the place is extremely relaxed and intimate. You’ll be amazed at how fast total strangers will feel like close friends. And there’s free food everywhere. Non-alcoholic drinks are free too. The only thing they charge for is liquor. ”

“That sounds amazing. ” said Lynx, eyes full of stars.

“Sounds creepy to me. ” sniffed Sable.

“Sounds good to me. ” said Bull, with a big grin plastered across his hard-chiseled face.

“No kidding. ” said Shark. “That’s the kind of place I’ve been looking for my whole life. ”

This earned him some strange looks from the others.

“What? ” he said. “I’ve got feelings. ”

“So what you are saying, ” said Tiger, “is that it’s worth the wait. ”

“Absolutely. ” said the lady. “I just wish it was bigger. ”

“Bigger?” said Bull.

“How big is it?”  said Lynx.

“Oh, it’s tiny!” said the lady. “Couldn’t be more than six tables , and maybe three or four people for each… like I said, it’s intimate. ”

“Why is it so small? ” said Sable.

“Oh, so now you’re interested? ” said Shark.

“Fuck off, Shark. ” Sable said sweetly.

“I don’t know why it’s so small. ” said the lady. “But get this… it has a VIP section. ”

“Bullshit. ” said Tiger.

“I swear to god. ” said the lady. “It’s the size of a bus shelter  and I have never seen anyone go in or come out of it, but I swear it’s there. ”

“Weird. ” said Bull.

Just then, the line moved forward.

“I guess we’ll find out when we get there. ” said Shark.

I know all this because I can see and hear everything that happens in and around my club from my security booth in the VIP section.

I like to watch people having fun. It gives me a warm feeling, almost like I am a part of things. Accepted. Included.

Perhaps even welcome.

Sometimes I get up from my chair and stretch my hands torwards the wall and imagine I can feel their heat. Their life force. The movement of their bodies, the drumbeat of their lives, the beating of their hearts.

But all I can really feel are the vibrations of the music and conversation.

On bad nights, I find myself staring at the door that leads to the club and wishing I could bring myself to open it.

This is my club. I tell myself. These are my people. I’ve successfully created a club that even I would feel comfortable in and all I have to do to enjoy the fruit of my labour is open the door and let them up. Or go out to them.

So I stare at that doorknob and will myself to do it. But nothing happens.No matter how hard I try,. I stay frozen in my booth, watching them while staying hidden, keeping people at a safe distance from me.

Because I know, deep down, that I can never, ever. ever let anyone in, ever. I am doomed to forever being on the outside looking in. I can see it all from where I am sitting, and know more about some people than they know themselves. I can see everything from many angles and many points of view. I can make brilliant observations and spot-on predictions because of all I have seen from this tiny room.

But I can never be a part of it. Not really. To open that door would destroy me. Of this I am certain. It would destroy me and I would freak out and lose myself and after it all calmed down, I would be even lonelier than I was before.

So I sit. And watch, unseen. Not even my employees know who I am. They get their pay via direct deposit and their orders via text message. For all they know. I could be a Lovecraftian horror, or a tiny Asian woman, or even a famous actor who wants to observe real live people in order to research a role.

But I am none of those. I’m just some messed up dude who watches other people lead the kind of life he has always wanted but can never had.

And that wouldn’t be so bad…. if I wasn’t so God. Damned. LONELY.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Well, I wrung my ears out onto the page about how depressed I was last night, so tonight must be the one where I talk about how IDGAF^[1] any more and how everyone {2} }needs to GTFO of my head and BTFO^[3] because I seriously don’t give a shit any more, nothing matters anyway, and ten years after I die everyone will have forgotten me and all I have done, so why bother.

Well, that last bit is a bit of a stretch. But it’s how I feel, now what I believe.

I am so sick and tired of living in a state of eternal internal pressure from constantly being at war with myself. I should know by now that it is futile to try to force myself into what I think I should be instead of working with who I really am.

But I have been too long at war, and peace seems like an impossible dream, like when you dream you can fly like Superman.

I can’t imagine what it would be like if this war between my will and my self ended. These massive conflicts are what generates my ideas, insights, and so on. They are the wellsprings of my creativity.

If I did not have these pressures constantly compacting the content of my mind, I might not be the creative whiz I am today.

Worse, I might actually be, you know….

Fru (in a hushed tone) : …normal.

When you have been a freak of nature on many levels for your entire life, being normal is like a death sentence, in that you’d rather die.

Why? Because the only way to deal with being different than everyone else is to convince yourself that, on some level at least, you are the good kind of different.

After all, being superior to everyone else is a form of being different. A star athlete is different than everyone else because of their superior talents. Nobody gives them shit for being different.

Of course, they had people actively looking for people like them. If the world was fair, there would be the same thing for us smart types and I would have been “discovered” and pointed to scholarships and all those good things at an early age.

Instead, my advanced intellect (and the social weirdness it produced) : meant two things : I was bored in class and everyone hated me.

The kids. The teachers. The staff. The principle. Everyone.

Well not my family, of course. They would have had to notice me first.

Not that I’m bitter (NTIB).

Anyhow, this need to believe you are the good kind of different is what drives so many of us gifted types into elitism. It must be a great comfort to believe that you are persecuted entirely because of your superiority and the people who shun you are the ones who are bad and wrong, not you.

But as patient readers know, I am not capable of that kind of self-delusion. I very clearly see why I was such a social pariah now.

It wasn’t my fault, but I get why it happened.

And even if I was capable of that level of bullshitting myself, I still could not embrace intellectual elitism because it disgusts me. I find it wholly repugnant and even the thought of putting myself above others like that makes me queasy.

That’s probably why I react so strongly to intellectual elitism in others. It really pisses me off, far more than it should – I mean, whatever you need to do to cope is your business – and I find myself driven to counter it and bring people back down to Earth.

Not my job, I know, and not always a good thing either. All I can say in my defense is that I realized what a nightmarish dead end intellectual elitism was at an early age and sincerely want to show people a way out of the trap.

Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a person is help them get over themselves. That does not mean shattering their self-worth or grinding them into the dirt to make yourself look better.

It means giving them the jolt they need to bring them back to reality, get a real good look at what they have been doing, and ask themselves if that’s truly what they want to be doing or is it just a coping strategy that got stuck in a loop.

Sometimes, the short sharp shock is the only way to break out of that loop.

I can sort of tiptoe up to the outer border of intellectual elitism and convince myself that my advanced mind is part of why I don’t get along with others and that I truly am, like,  really, really, really smart, but that’s as far as it goes.

In my life, being intellectually gifted has cause me far, far more problems than it has ever solved. I don’t begrudge my gifts for that and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

Except, like, a billion dollars. I’m not made of stone, after all.

But as a basis for a feeling of superiority over others, they make for sandy shifting ground. One might as well feel superior for having a hunchback or being blind.

Hopefully, some day, I will find a position that lets me view my superbrain as something valuable instead of seeing it as a liability. I know, intellectually (ha) that I have vast gifts that many people would give their favorite appendages to have, and I am actually quite lucky to be that way.

But until it actually does me some good, the jury is still out in the trial of Good Thing Versus Bad Thing re : being very smart.

It doesn’t really make a difference if you are intellectually gifted if you are emotionally crippled from decades of isolation.

In that case, you are not a miracle worker with astounding abilities.

You’re just another wizard on welfare.

But, you know. NTIB.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[2]] And by “everyone” I really mean “all the voices in my head”. [[2]]

Been feeling depressed lately.

The pebble that started the avalance was when Joe and Julian asked if I felt like staying up to watch our usual Colbert and Daily Show when I got home from the Paragon meeting on Thursday night.

And I said no because my social batteries were pretty drained and I just wanted to go to my room and let them recharge while I played Skyrim.

More about Skyrim later.

Now, I have turned them down in that exact situation before and it always makes me feel a little guilty but this time, the second I sat down at the computer. I was hit with a tidal wave of depression, of which the guilt was merely the crest.

I felt awful. Like someone had just dumped ice water onto the embers of my soul. It’s a feeling I am familiar with but rarely does it happen in so dramatic a fashion.

As near as I can tell, this happened because a certain amount of whatever it is I generally vent through self-hatred had built up due to my recent anti-self abuse campaign, and like snowpack on a mountainside. when it got to a certain point, it all went downhill into the valley, and took me with it.

It’s hard not to see this as some sort of electrochemical discharge that resolves some imbalance in the mind. The usual route is blocked and so the charge accumulates until some small thing provide the opportunity for it to discharge.

Well, it’s hard for ME not to see it that way. Others might feel differently.

Then, on Sunday night, the same thing happened – J&J wanted to watch stuff and I was too socially drained to say yes.

And another sadness tsunami hit me when I sat down at the computer.

I think the specific triggering mechanism is the pain of a missed connection. As you wonderful lovely beautiful readers know, I’m effusive.

You also know that connecting with others is very difficult for me and as a result I have been a very lonely person for a very long time. That’s what that whole robot with the busted antenna thing was about. And so this terrible icy isolation is always just below the surface with me, and it longs for connection with others.

And so when there is an opportunity for it and I turn it down, that unleashed the same sort of emotion that a person who has recently known starvation would feel about turning down a meal – even if they were already full.

This social starvation, like any large body of unexpressed emotion, is not amenable to reason. In both cases, I really was too tired to socialize and needed to recharge my introvert batteries with some alone time. If I had listened to this voice and forced myself to hang with the two J’s,. I would have been, at best, indifferent company, and at worse I would have been sitting there resenting the whole thing and counting the minutes until I could finally run away and hide.

So 1turning them down was the right choice. But my social starvation doesn’t care. Someone offered connection and I turned them down and now I feel like a horrible human being just for setting boundaries and looking after my own needs.

It’s a rough life inside this skull of mine.

Sometimes I wonder how I even survive.

Okay, now fast forward to today. I was still feeling pretty depressed. And that is presumably what gave a certain voice in my head (that I usually ignore) a chance to really speak its mind.

So while I was (what else?) playing Skyrim, periodically, a voice in my head would scream things like “THIS IS NOT LIFE!” and “THIS CAN’T BE IT” and “THERE HAS TO BE MORE THAN THIS” and “I WANT TO LIVE!”

So that happened. It’s probably a good thing despite the fact that it made me even more miserable at the time. IT means that the forces inside me are gathering towards a big burst of productivity.

And it better be soon, because the thing is, I actually have an assignment.

Some people who contacted me via UpWork want me to write a thirty second movie parody scene for no-budget production, it’s been over a week since they asked for it, and I still have not been able to do it.

That’s the biggest threat to my mood right now. I feel crushed between my pressure on myself and my paralyis.

And the two are not unrelated.

It’s the infinite hallway with infinite doors problem again. The assignment is too wide-open. I need a little more to go on. Otherwise, option paralysis will have me in its grip until the situation is “resolved” by them giving up on me.

And the thing is, this is totally within my capacities. So I “should” be able to do it. Thirty seconds is half a page. One sufficiently funny exchange and I am done.

So I know I can do it once the mental blockage it out of the way,.

But until then, I am under a lot of stress.

I have been through this process before when I have had an open-ended project like this. It happened numerous times during my time at VFS. I hem and I haw and I hate myself and I freeze up inside and it’s only when I have worked through all of that bullshit that I can actually do the thing, which is, of course, absurdly easy for me once I managed to get out of my own way.

SO hopefully, by writing this stuff down, I will have accelerated the process so that I can clear my mental logjam and write these people something before they walk away.

I mean, really. I’m a goddamned comedy genius. I know that once I get over myself, I will be able to write something that blows them away.

I just have to make it throyugh that goddamned hallway first.

Anyone seen my keychain?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Being freshly awoken, I have zero idea of what to write about today. To be honest, my brain is just not there yet.

But I am eating and drinking Diet Coke, and that should help.

Until then, here goes whatever.

My toilet overflowed a little. And then it overflowed a little more when I stuck the plunger in there to clear the clog.  I must have done something highly uncharacteristic and walked away from a toilet as it flushes without waiting to see how it goes.

When you have the toilet-clogging history I do – I have to unclog my toilet once a day, minimum – you learn never to turn your back on a flushing toilet because that can lead to disaster. You must stand ready and alert because you might need to jiggle the handle to stop the flow then grab the plunger and prepare to do battle.

Pooping away from home can be very nerve-wracking for me for this very reason.

Cleaning up the spillage exceeds my modest life-competency capacities, so I have enlisted Joe’s help. Once more, I need Joe to rescue me from my own misfortunes.

And the fact that it is something toilet-related sets off all kinds of fucked up Freudian shame issues for me, but luckily I am not yet awake enough for that to have much effect on my mood.

Thank goodness all that was in there was pee.

Been having trouble staying focused lately. I keep drifting off into reverie. It’s happened three times already as I have been typing this. Woops, there goes number four.

This is usually a sign that I need more sleep. It’s like a microdose form of the microsleeps that come from extreme sleep deprivation. I don’t actually fall asleep, I just slip into a line of thinking and free association and end up just sitting here, lost in thought, and then have to drag myself back to the present.

It’s not unpleasant. In fact, the reverie itself is kind of pleasant. A dreamer’s paradise, I suppose, being able to go entirely into our own minds without losing contact with reality and plunging into the dark and unclean waters of the subconscious mind.

Makes it damned frustrating to try to get anything done, though. Such as blogging.

Playing another large-ish quest mod. This one is called the Grey Cowl of Nocturnal. 

So far it’s very puzzle-heavy, without a lot of combat. Normally I would find that frustrating, but the puzzles and the level designs are interesting and challenging enough that I don’t find myself spoiling for a fight very often.

Only had to peek at a walkthrough twice, both times minor. I don’t feel too bad aboyut that because I solved a hell of a lot of tricky puzzles all my myself, and so my batting average is quite high.

Still, it rankles my gamer’s pride. Esp[ecially because the two times I had to do it were for things I totally could have figured out myself if I had given myself more time.

In my defense, I was burning through a hell of a lot of brain calories and mentally tired.

If only mental activity was as good as physical activity when it came to promoting health. I’d be positively aglow with wholesomeness.

Mental activity does burn actual, non-metaphorical calories, though. So I suppose I would be even fatter if I didn’t spend all day working my very metaphorical brain muscles through media consumption.

I am way past the point where such things are optional. Like a star athlete, my mental workout are mandatory because my “muscles” demand it.

If I was in a situation where I had no books and no access to video games and no other suitable substitutes, I think I would go crazy.

In fact, I might go semi-catatonic because all I would end up doing would be lying or sitting down and dreaming my life away in that exact same kind of reverie I talked about earlier in this post.

And I would get really, really good at masturbating.

Of course, all that presupposes that I can’t write. If I can write, then that is what I would do most of the time. I imagine I would be like one of those loonies that filss binder after binder with tales of the life he wishes he was living.

Plus the usual obvious psychmacheas, bizarre psychosexual fantasies, Book of Revelations-level spritual journeys, and grandiose pontifications.

Doesn’t sound half bad, actually. I will consider it my backup plan.

Like I have said in this space before, I would love to go somewhere, say for a long weekend, where it is nice and quiet and away from it all, with only a computer with no internet capabilities and only a text editor installed.

Base on past experiences with internet outages, my mind would soon be bursting with inspiration and I would end up wrting like hell the whole time.

Dunno if any of it would be any good – going into that feverish state of mind is a lot like an acid trip in that I have no idea whether it would be a good trip or a bad trip – but it would probably do me a lot of good.

It would relieve a lot of that word pressure in my head and hopefully clear my mind and let me work out some of my issues via writing.

That’s not going to happen in my current world of distractions, but my dream getaway would be the ideal conditions for it.

That’s more or less what was happening with last November’s NaNoWriMo novel. It wasn’t quite as unhinged and psychedelic (sp?) as I had planned, but it still helped me a lot because I got some ideas oyut of my head and onto the page.

Plus, of course, lots of smutty stuff. Mostly implied rather than described, but implies so heavily that even a Mormon child would figure it out.

I really should give porn writing a try. I am sure. I could write some amazing stuff.

And what the hell, people might actually pay for that kinda stuff.

Money. What a concept.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.