Or something like that.

Writing earlier than usual – as of this moment, it is 12:31 pm. Usually I write when I eat supper, which is usually somewhere nearish to 7 pm. But today, I am writing as I eat my lunch, which I usually do around 1 pm but I got sick of playing Skyrim so here I am.

See if you can detect the subtle differences in range, tone, and style between evening Fru and afternoon Fru. And if you find them, please tell me, because I’d love to know what the heck they are.

Feeling a little restless. Annoyed at a Skyrim mod I added recently. It promised to be 16 long quests, all in the same storyline, and that’s exactly what I want.

But the very first frigging quest is to gather ten Vampire Dust (easy to get, vamps are not hard to find) and ten Daedra Hearts (which are really fucking rare and I have no idea where to go to find them).

I hope this isn’t what makes the quests “long”.  Any fool can make a quest that takes a long time if they just make the goals damn near impossible.

Oh well. Perhaps there’s a trick to it that I am not seeing. I might look up a walkthrough and see how that person handled it.

Feeling relatively okay at the moment. I am still dealing with a lot of free floating anxiety that hovers like a shadow at the edge of my consciousness, waiting to strike. And that is no fun at all.

Most of the time, when it strikes, the point of entry is my obsession with time as a resource. I am a compulsive clock-watcher – I have been all my life – and for most of my life, it’s been a nuisance at worst and a valuable skill at best.

It’s amazing how neuroses and valuable skills can be two settings on the same dial. A neat freak might become a top notch researcher via their impeccable filing system. Another person’s sense of inadequacy might lead them to be a top ranking athlete. A third person might become an excellent marriage counselor because their childhood was forever marred by a nasty ugly divorce.

And who knows, someone’s shyness and difficulty expressing emotions and voicing his needs might lead them to hyper-focus on verbal skills and lead them to being a pretty darn good writer.

Nah. That would never happen.

Anyhoo, back to time. My obssession with time and clock-watching wasn’t a problem until fairly recently and it’s connected to my Skyrim addiction.

Because I’m an addict, I am constantly worrying over my supply. This being a video game and not heroin, the supply in question is the time I have to play it. So I will be playing the game and watching the time to anticipate when the next thing – like going to therapy, or blogging, or whatever – that will take me away from the game will be.

And that’s not crazy. Well, no crazier than my baseline level of lunacy, anyhow.

But the problem is that my neurotic mind takes that “time left” quantity and turns it into a resource in my mind – one which, by its very nature, I lose constantly.

Now here if where this gets tricky because I feel like I have to explain some fundamental things about my psychology and that can be a dicey proposition.

The core dynbamic here is oversensitivity to loss. It is a common problem in those of us of a resource-based mindset – it’s even one of the prime mechanics of hoarding.

It comes from a sense of scarcity and a lack of a feeling of security. The feeling of the world being a dangerous place and of never having enough of what you need combine in a nasty cocktail of fear and paranoia.

So someone like me, therefore, having time valued as a precious resource in my mind is disastrous because it’s a resource I can do nothing to preserve. It will disappear at a minute per minute no matter what I do.

And if I were a healthier Bull, I cojuld be philosophical about that. But lately I have gotten into this very unhealthy pattern of watching my remaining Skyrim time dwindle and reacting as if something very precious was being stolen from me.

That triggers feeling of helplessness and despair and pushed my anxiety level towards the freaking out mode when all is happening is the passage of time.

That’s clearly maladaptive. To put it mildly.

So I have been trying to attack this problem on a cognitive level by telling myself that running out of Skyrim time and having to stop playing is not some earth shattering dislocating trauma but merely the putting down one thing I like in order to go do another thing I like.

And it’s beginning to work but it’s pretty rough going. Addictions don’t die that easy and a big part of my mind still feels like every time I have to return from Skyrim to reality (so to speak) is like being plucked from your mother’s arms and tossed naked into a snowbank in the middle of February.

It’s a harsh image but it’s how I feel.

So overcoming this time torture will take some time. As will overcoming the Skyrim addiction itself. Skyrim sucks up most of my time, and to be honest, I am not getting all that much reward out of it most of the time.

But I keep playing because I am scared of going back to a life where I had to figure out what to do with myself all the time, day in and day out.

It’s so much easier to fill the hours with Skyrim.

But I have a plan to dig myself out, and it started with getting one of the previous games in the series – a game called Morrowind.

That will be my methadone. After that, I will transition to something else in the same general vein, like Fallout 4 or Witcher 3.

After that, I might even try something totally new!

And I will start right after I play through this quest mod… oh, and this archery mod looks cool… plus, I want to go back to Enderal…. and….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m going to start off talking about the Black Panther movie tonight.

I haven’t seen it.

But I am seeing the massive positive effect it is having on America and possibly the whole world, and I am loving it with all my heart, soul, gonads, and mind.

Gonads is a funny word.

Anyhow, here is my completely unqualified opinin as to the secret of its power and therefore its power : it has had such a massive effect on people because it presents a vision of black people completely empowered.

There is no hesitance, defensiveness, apology, deference, or shame in the people of Wakanda. They were never conquered. They were never enslaved. They were never subject to the racist laws of the racist government of a racist people. They never were relegated to a part of a city that was then abandoned by the government that wanted that money to go to, ya know, real people. They never grew up in a place where only drug dealers have money and everyone knows someone who was executed by the police and the options in life are be a criminal or be on welfare.

So they are completely confident in their worth. For them, equality isn’t even a question. The whole issue of racism would seem utterly absurd to them. They have never known it and therefore they are completely self-assured and fearless.

But more than that, they possess every single measure of worth known to humanity, and in abundance. They are not just rich but the richest people on Earfth by a landslide. They are the most technologically advanced nation in the world. They are highly educated and sophisticated. They have a society so humane and socially advanced that they make everyone else look like pigs fighting over trough.

There is absolutely no grounds to object to them that are not racist, is what I am saying. They rock on all levels.

So no wonder black people all over the world don’t just love the movie – it is their new mission in life. It shows people who look just like them who are strong, indepedent, confident, powerful, and utterly without the slightest bit of shame about who they are.

And to be honest, that’s why it makes white audiences too. By portraying black people in such a powerful way, it chases the evil shadows of racism out of our minds. We no longer feel like we have to fear for black people or apologize either to or for them because the movie erases every single black stereotype we have ever absorbed through the culture and replaces it with something pure and good and right.

Not that I think the movie is going to end racism, of course. But it sure as hell works hard to destroy it.

And, as a beautifully bitter bonus. it’s causing a lot of people’s racism to come to the surface as they express their objections to the movie, all of which are racist, and which boil down to things like “These black people are very scary to me!” or “what is depicted here is racially impossible” or “How am I supposed to feel racially superior now?”.

Or how about this one : “I object, in the strongest possible language,  to this film’s blatant attempt to make me see black people as individuals when I am far more comfortable thinking of them as all conforming to the most ego-pleasing racial stereotypes I have hand-picked for myself!

P.S. I am not a racist. ”

To me, this is not merely one of the best schadenfrude buffets in recorded history, as magnificently glorious as that is (mmmm, salt).

It’s an extremely healthy purging of the body politic of the infection of racism by forcing it to come out of the dark and face the clear clean light of day.

Yes, it’s extremely ugly. And if you are an idealistic bent, I am sure you are saddened to discover how much racism there still is in the world.

But remember this : what you may be tempted to see as racism rising is actually the marvelous spectacle of racism dying.  Every time racism is forced to show its ugly, ugly face in public, people’s reponses utterly destroy their delusion that somehow, people support what they do, and make it super fucking clear that they are wrong, wrong, wrong. according to whatever percentage of white people they think of as “really white”.

And all the wailing and lamenting and gnashing of the teeth and butthurt snowflake whining will only strengthen the perception that they are the weak and diseased part of society and it is we, the righteous, who are strong.

Therefore, even if your reptile brain is the only part of your brain that works, it is very very clear which side is the top lizard and which one is historical desbris.

Equalty people strong! Racist people weakl! Me back strong people!

This is how societies change and how social progress happens. Force the ugliness to the surface and it dies like Dracula in a tanning booth. The kids of the day, the ones who actually believe all the idealism we fed them and do not yet have any reason to compromise,  will attack the bad olf beliefs like goddamn white blood cells, and with the moral authority of innocence, burn the old beliefs out of the body politic.

That’s how attitudes change. There is a reason these idiots claim not to be racist, no matter how blatantly racist they are, and that’s because society has made it clear to even the most morally retarded of them knows that to be a racist is to be a very bad person, one that belongs in the same category as criminals, terrorists, and lunatics.

So they cannot accept that label for themselves, no matter how apt it is.

And that was not always the case. Go back to the Sixties and racism was considered to be a legitimate political position, like being pro-choice or anti-gun.

Go back further and it was accepted on the cosmological level. Something as obviously true as water being wet and things falling when you drop them.

What changed it? The tireless efforts of people willing to face the wrath of Hell itself in order to change people’s minds.

And god damn it,. it worked!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.