Lousy sleep. Sweaty and disoriented. You know the drill.

The words, they do not come easy right now. I am seriously torn as to whether it would be smarter to go back to bed rather than blog at my usual time, which is now.

On days when I have nothing in particular to do in the evening, I blog somewhere nearish to 7 pm. On days when I do have something to do in the evening, I blog withing a stone’s throw from 1 pm.

Fascinating, I know. But wait, there’s more.

On days when I am feeling particularly ill, I sometimes break the blogging into two 500 word sections and do one per sitting. That gives me a smaller and therefore far less intimidating goal to face per sitting. .

That doesn’t happen very often though. I have done literally thousands of blog entries. I am quite used to it by now. The words flow fairly freely, even on bad days.

Like right now. Although I must admit, I don’t feel ill so much as I feel tired and sort of gross. That might change before I am done typing.

That’s the great thing about being totally unstable. Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes and it will change!

Ha ha… ha.

If it doesn’t change by the time I hit 500 words, I guess this is going to be one of those two segment days, because I am damned tired. This is what happens when I get behind on sleep. I end up having that difficult kind of sleep which I think comes from my mind going into REM oversdrive as it catches up on all the dreaming it missed.

I guess that means that when my head clears, my head will be clearer.

Or…. eh. You know what I mean.

I sometimes wonder if I would sleep better if I didn’t drink so much Diet Coke. I don’t think so. I seem to sleep just as well (or, more times than not, just as badly) whether I have had any Diet Coke recently.

Then again, I do drink a fair bit of the stuff. And I have a strange relationship with caffiene. Sometimes its effect is strangely delayed..

So I dunno either way. What I do know is that I am addicted to the stuff, and that can’t be just because it tastes so good.

If I go without for long enough, I begin to crave it. Not in a hardcore way, just at a nuisance level. If that goes on long enough, it escalates to mild fantasies of Diet Coke consumption. Fantasies in which the Diet Coke tastes like the nectar of the gods.

I find it all terribly amusing. It’s such a small addiction that it’s downright adorable. I might feel differently if I suffered from withdrawal symptoms but I don’t. I don’t get cranky, or sleepy, or headachey if I don’t get the stuff.

The symptoms are mild and easily dismissed.

I have never goitten into coffee because I have never had a reason to do so. If I had a job, things might be different. I might get into the whole coffee thing both in order to have the fuel I needed to work and in order to better fit in.

The sad thing is that I am 44 years old and drinking coffee would make me feel like a grownup. SO would having a job.

Because I still haven’t grown up. Not on the inside. I am frozen at around 13 years of age. I was never truly a teenafer, not psychologically. And apart from my college years,. I have led a cloistered life from which there seems to be no escape.

I mean, I know what I need to do next. The only way I am going to resolve the conflict between this feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction with my life and my massive intertia is to set out to do something challenging to said inertia and bulldoze my way through the fear and resistance until it is done.

And I will do so. Soon. Ish.

But right now I feel too tired and weak. I just want to crawl into bed and go back to sleep. PRess tghe snbooze alarm oin life and hope to feel bettter when I wake.

But I have miles to go before I sleep. Miles to go before I sleep.

And around 270 words.

Sometimes I feel like I am stuck in the nozzle of a funnel and all this stuff drops from the sky and gets funneld down to land on my poor head.

What I need is the strength to fight back, To solve problems instead of avoiding them or escaping from them.

And the courage to turn around, look my ghosts right in the eys, and demand ID.

But my life is always a struggle between what I know I “ought” to do and what I actually can do. It would be lovely if those two lined up more often.

But I cna only do what I can do. The notion that I could be doing more to help myself is both noxious and specious. It’s a toxic attitude that only serves as an expression of my depression. It’s an attitude I can’t afford to entertain.

And, it’s true that I’m not happy with my life. That needs to be expressed too. I keep waiting for that crisis moment where I have finally had enough and I break out of my shell in a moment of pure rage, but it’s been a long time coming.

So maybe I need to think of some larger move. Something clever and strategic that is both within my current powers and effective in drawing myself out.

If only depression was lke any other illness and you could just spend some time in the hospital and come out completely cured.

But no. It is, instead, a daily struggle against a montrous burden that crushes the life out of you and makes the simplest things impossible.

I want to walk in the sun again.

I want to feel like I am alive.

I want the springtime of my soul to finally arrive.

And I am so very tired of waiting.

I will takk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thanks, Sir Philip Sidney.

How geeky is this : I know that line because the superhero The Vision said it when establishing a rapport with Hank Pym.

Basically, they were nerding out together. Gotta love it.

Tonight’s blogging will be an uphill struggle because I have been havinjg troiuble sleeping lately and it’s definitely taking its toll. I can feel my medium term memory filling up and displacing my working memory, which in turn makes it hard to stay focused and hard to stya in the here and now and hard, sometimes. to remember who I am and what the fuck it is that I am doing.

But only for a few seconds. So far.

Oddly enough, this does not impact my video game performance as much as you would think. I think that’s because video games offer such a rich and reliable stream of stimulation that it can compensate for my lack of working memory by keeping what brain space I have left in a hyper excited,. high performence state.

The reason I am overdrawn at the sleep bank is that I had such a hard time getting to sleep last night. I don’t know why. But my mind just would not slow down so I could rest. It just kept whirling around like an out of control merry go round.

It took hours of laying very still and letting the windmills of my mind wear themselves down before I got to the point where I could drop off.

And then I woke up less than two hours later. and couldn’t get back to sleep again. So I had to get up and do stuff.

Since then,  I managed to get an hour and a half of near-sleep and that is it. Right now, all I really want to do is take a nap.

And that’s a good sign in that I am at least getting sleepy instead of feeling like my eyes are being held open like in A Clockwork Orange. And a voice in my head says, through a bullhorn : I hope you’re enjoyiung the ride, because you CAN’T GET OFF!”

My mind is kind of haunted.

But I have pizza on the way and blogging to do, and so I cannot just curl up in bed and catch up on my sleeptime.

There are thing that need to be done. And eaten. Things that need to be done and/or eaten, whichever is appropriate.

I am struggling with my meaningless existance lately. And I don’t mean that in some throwaway, hyper dramatic emo way, either.

I mean it literally. My life is devoid of meaning because it lacks the most critical form of meaning : meaningful effort.

A lot of the time. I feel like I am just biding my time and waiting to die. What else do I have to show for my time? It has been a long time since I did anything that really meant something, as judged by the only judge that matters…

Wapner. Just kidding. It’s me!

And maybe that’s part of the problem. I am mentally ill, as you all know, so my judgment as to what is meaningful effort is, at best. somewhat suspect. It could be that part of the problem is that no matter what I do, if it conflict with my self-loathing and therefore would require a massive restructuring of my mind, I will reject it.

That’s how a lot of badness persists in the human mind. Our brains automatically rejects things which would require too big a change or that are inconsistent with what is already known and taken as true.

It’s a necessary function that protects mental integrity, but it operates just as efficiently and effectively whether what is known is rock solid truth or felonious bullshit.

That’s why people are so adept at rejecting evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs. It might be the most credible and verifiable evidence possible, but if it conflicts with what is already there, the mind just says “Nope!” and rejects the information before it can destabilize the psyche.

It is a rare person indeed that can truly be naked before the truth.  It requires extraordinary mental discipline (and maybe being somewhat mentally fucked up) in order to really commit to the spirit of the scientific method, which I formulate thusly :

I will believe nothing that that the evidence does not support, and everything that it does support, no matter what.

Italics on that second part, because it’s the part most people have the hardest time with. It’s relatively easy to reject things for which there is no evidence.

I’m not saying most people do it, I am just saying it’s easier.

But accepting the truth of that which conflicts with a great deal of what the person already knows is extremely difficult and not for amateurs.

Hence “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. In fine detail, that is not logically justifiable. The nature of the claim has no logical connection to its burden of proof. There is either sufficient evidence to support the claim or there isn’t.

Calling a claim “extraordinary” is, strictly speaking, an emotional valuation. not a logical one. It just means that the claiim feels implausible.

But plausibility is also an emotional valuation. not a logical one. The truth is the truth no matter how we feel about it.

But that’s nitpicking. For the most part, this maintaining of integrity in the human mind correponds sufficiently to reality for it to be useful.

And honestly. I am not sure we have a choice. I mean, I’m a mental mutant from the shadowy fringes of society and I doubt I could accept strongly conflicting evidence more than twenty percent of the time.

Because the truth is that, under all the mental machinery of the logical mind, there are still things we simply do not want to be true. And we willl avoid believing those things for as long as we can because we don’t want to be upset.

It’s a very human weakness.

And as such. I treasure and value it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.