Well, it’s Thursday, so I suppose I should talk about Sunday.

As patient readers know, I have been working on getting in touch with my anger for a long time and recently I have had some success in overcoming the feeling that if I so much as open the door a crack on all that suppressed rage, I will turn into some kind of rampaging rage monster and go on a ten province rampage of murder. rape, and tacos.

I really like tacos.

And I could feel the anger building in me over the last week or so. Bitter, sarcastic remarks about whatever annoyed me started bubbling up to the surface and it was taking an increasing amount of energy to keep myself from saying them.

And well, you don’t need a Euler line equation to figure out how that’s going to end.

This all came to a head last Sunday. I will try to be brief but here’s how things went down, more or less :

La Gang and I, plus Garth, were planning to go visit R. Graeme Cameron’s place so we could salvage what we could from his enormous stockpile of BCSFA-related memorabilia before he moves to Nanaimo at the end of June and has to recycle most of it ’cause it can’t come with him.

I promised you brief. I didn’t promise you simple. And I could go into why he has to move away from us but it’s a whole thing so I will just say that I want to kill his evil psycho parasite of an ex wife.

Seriously, Alex. Fuck you.

Anyhow. That was the setup. And last I heard, we were going to make this trip “a few hours before FRED”.

Apparently, from that, I was supposed to deduce that by “a few” they meant “five”, and that if I wanted to go on this trip, I was supposed to be ready by one.

Or noon, actually, because that’s when Joe and Julian actually left.

Julian woke me up at something like 10:30 and told me that he and Joe would be leaving soon. I assumed that they had decided that they would get an early start on things and that I would be going with Felicity later in the day.

But nope. That’s when everybody was going. Nobody told me this. Nobody told me that the plan was to stay there for three hours either. So I had none of the information I needed in order to make the deductions everyone assumed I would make.

Even though they know I am clueless by nature and don’t make those sorts of deductions even when I have all of the necessary information and the deductions are far simpler and more straightforward.

So for definitely not the first time in my life. I got left behind. Plans changed, nobody told me anything, and somehow, mysteriously, these new plans did not include me.

For someone with my issues, this is Very Very Bad.

As you know, I constantly battle the feeling that nobody really wants me around and that people are happier without me and will ditch me any time they think they can get away with it and don’t have to tell me to my face.

And of course, people never “intend” to do these things. If they did, they’d feel guilty about it. What happens is a lot subtler than that.

People just don’t think of me.

My friends claim they “expected” me to deduce the real plan from the information I had, but that is total bullshit. The truth is, they just didn’t think about me at all. They made their plans without any thought to my place in it and I got left behind as a result.

I mean really. Who in the world would take “a few hours before 6 pm” to mean “be ready by 1 pm”? Nobody, that’s who.

And despite my intentions, all this came to a head at FRED. I really didn’t want to have the big huge argument that I knew would come from this confluence of factors at FRED, with all the other FRED goers held hostage while the argument raged on for an hour or more, and I deeply regret that it did.

But it had to happen. I have to stop letting myself get stepped on by people and this was the turning point on that. I had to express my anger at getting hurt to those involved and live with the consequences. There were no other options.

Why? Because that’s the next step on my path to recovery. I have reached the point where I must assert myself and through doing so exert my right to exist and have needs and have those needs taken into consideration by others.

And that is bound to seem unjust to those who feel like they have been doing that all along,. And I am sorry for that. It is not their fault that they did not know they were hurting me. After all, I didn’t say anything about it or indicate it in any way.

But that does mean things are going to change in my life and those changes will not be optimized for the comfort and convenience of others.

They will be optimized for maximim improvement in my mental health. That doesn’t mean that I will not take other people into account. It just means that their concerns will no longer hold a higher priority than my own.

And I know this process is going to be ugly, and that to those who know me, it will seem to be a sudden change in personality on my part and they might miss the “old me”.

Too bad. The old me is dead. I have uncorked the bottle of my true self and that means I will have to learn to deal with a full range of human emotions, including anger.

I have to integrate my id into my psyche if I want to come back from the grave.

And I want that more than anything else in this world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As in, I am writing this after gpoing to my doctor.

I feel good about the fact that I finally got my shit together enough to make the appointment and get my ass there.

For one thing, it got me out of the apartment into a beautiful sunny day. It’s the perfect day for me : blue skies and sunshine withoutit being too hot.

IThat is ideal weathr chez moi. The outdoors, but with air comnditioning.

Speaking of sunshine, that actually came up during my appointment. My GP, Doctor Chao, mentiuoned how my symptoms might be due (at least in part) to a Vitamin D deficiency. I mentioned that I don’t exactly get a lot of sun, and he said he didn’t think anyone did any more.

And that opened up a whole thing in my mind because he’s right, and that means most people are walking around Vitamin D deficient, and iwhat does that mean for society?

According to the great god Google, the main symptoms of vitamin D deficiency are weak bone and muscles. Yikes.

Dunnoi what that has to do with my mental fog, but whatever. I trust my doctor knows what is is talking about.

The easiest solution would be for me to start drinking milk a lot. Milk had both calcium and the vitamin D I need to use it. But meh.

Milk tastes good but it’s kind of a hassle because you have to be sure to use it all before it spoils, so you have to make a guess as to how much to buy at a time, and then it becomes this whole thing.

Besides, I haven’t been a mild drinker in so long that I bet it would make me sick.

Anyhow, back to the doctor’s office. I told him about how I haven;t toiuched the CPAP machine in years and why, and he didn’t seem to know what to think of that. I can’t uimagine I am the first patient to ever decide that CPAP was not for them, but he did not seem to know what to say.

I guess he didn’t expect it from me for some reason.

Anyhow, I then went on toi tell him about my growing issues with memory and other cognoitive functuions. I told him ghow I kept forgetting things and how I felt like the dog in my mind was getting thicker and that I was worfried that sleep apnea is making Swiss cheese out of my brain.

Not in those words, of course. He speaks perfect English but it;s not his native tongue and so I try not to throw too much verbal razzle dazzle at him.

He, of course, immediately wanted a whole bunch of tests done on me, and that is when I really shined because I told him quite firmly that the reason I never get the lab work done is fasting – I can’t.

If I go too long without food, I could die, Blood sugar crash,. Boom. Bad way to go.

And the kicker is that whatever test it was that demanded a 10 hour (!) fast from me, oit had nothing to do with my diabetes. The diabetes one is called a hemoglobin A1C test and it works my taking a lot of blood cells, all of which were created at different times and therefore have different blood sugar levels encoded into them, and averages them out to get a picture of how my whole blood sugar scene is going down.

So fuck whatever this other test he was giving me. I have a fresh lab req with zero fasting on it and that means I will be going to the lab a block from here and giving them my pee and blood and about a week later we will have some idea of WTF.

I have pondered possible outcomes. It could be that everything  comes back as A1  hunky dory on my testing, in which case shit woiuld have to escalate into some other form of testing, undoubtedly unpleasant.

So on that level, I would prefer the tests to come back with what is wrong clearly spelled out in numbers.

The worst case scenario would be that everything comes back A OK and there is nothing to indicate anything is wrong with me whatsoever so I am stuck knowing it is “all in my head”.

Well, actually, the worst case scenario would be finding out I had cancer so bad it was metastitizing to other people. but that’s hardly likely.

Finding out there was nothing physically wrong with me would be depressing, but it would still be something I could work with. It would simply mean that I needed to talk about it in therapy (something I plan to do tomorrow anyhow) and work on my psychological issues if I ever want to free my mind of this fucking fog.

It might be that the fog is there because of that numbing effect of depression I have spoken about. In response to emotional trauma, the brain produced a numbing agent in order to protect itself while it heals.

But some things don’t heal. And the numbing agent never goes away. And further trauma also never heal because too much of the brain is too numb to deal with them.

And voila, you’ve got yourself a depressive.

So it might be that my mental fog has gotten thicker and stickier because I am trying to deal with some very heavy shit in my mind and therefore numbing agent production has stepped up to compensate.

I have decades of suppressed anger and bitterness to process and the process ain’t gonna be pretty. I have little experience regulating rage and right now I feel like I have a particularly sarcastic version of The Hulk inside me that wants to verbally lash out at anything that pisses me off and it is going to take a while to integrate that part of me into my psyche in a balanced way.

So I am feeling quite cranky. And that’s new for me.

Guess I will have to learn to deal with it like a normal person.

What an utterly bizarre idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about the trandformation of habit into compulsion today.

As patient readers know. I have recently noticed that I have a lot of small compulsions and that this surprised me because I am like, the OPPOSITE of OCD.

So…. DCO, I guess.

Since I last spoke on the topic, I have been wondering how the heck these things come about in a non-OCD person like myself.

I have a few threads that might contribute to a theory.

One is that part of the mind I have referred to as the “superstition center”, but which should be called something less prejorative, like the Patterned Behaviour Center.

PBC, for short.

This part of our minds is extremely important. Without it, every single thing we did would take all the concentration and effort that the first time we did it took. That would be a massive cognitive load to try to handle. We’d likely be unable to do much else.

But no, we have the PBC. It lets us do routine things with the minimum possible strain on our brains by storing and executing previously learned patterns. It go straight from stimulus to action while barely setting foot in consciousness.

This runs the gamut from simple things. like the proper way to grasp certain objects, all the way up to something as complex as knowing how to drive.

And in a healthy person, that is more or less where it ends most of the time.

But the thing is, this part of the brain can do its job because it acts without thought.  That means that it bypasses our usual bounds of logic and sensibility and makes it hard to consciously access or alter bad patterns in order to change them,

Instead of operating on decisions, it operates on a very deep kind of feeling that you must do something or must not do something.

And that’s all well and good if we are talking about walking or driving or being a surgeon. But when neurosis corrupts the process. bad patterns get recorded right along with the good and useful ones, and the powerful emotions of the PBC get triggered by the wrong things.

This covers a lot of the sub-psychotic mental illnesses. PTSD is a prime example. Someone experiences something truly horrific, something with such a high emotional magnitude that the memory it creates is far too powerful for the psyche to handle.

But the mind also continues trying to process the experience so it can be put into long term memory, so the mind comes into conflict with itself and this comes out as flashbacks. One part of the mind tries to finish processing the memory while another balks at the strength of emotion involved, and this tension builds until the memory processing part forces the memory back into consciousness in order to try to get the job done once and for all.

A similar thing happens with phobias. The PBC of the brain forms a strong fear response to some given stimuli. A response so strong, in fact, that the conscious mind treats it as emotional trauma and triggers panic.

This is a negative reaction, and so when presented with the associated stimulus, the original scare gets replayed in the mind by its PBC and becomes a fresh trauma, which then heightens the fear even further.

And because all this comes from the PBC, rationality doesn’t help most people. Even with someone like me, who conquered his childhood fears via logic, can only hold off the phobic reaction via logic for so long.

Once my claustrophobia has been triggered, I can tell myself that the room has not gotten smaller and that there is plenty of air for everyone and everyone around me is just fine, and that hold off the full blown panic for a while.

Bu only for a while.

One key feature of the PBC is its emotional enforcement mechanism, which is an emotioin I will call compulsive dread.

It’s that feeling I have spoken of before that something terrible is going to happen if do not obey the compulsion. It’s a highly potent emotion that can be overwhelming in force, and the only way to relieve it is to obey the compulsion to do or not do it.

This compulsive dread is especially effective because it emanates from the PBC and is thus impossible for the conscious mind to regulate. The feeling is triggered without the conscious mind’s involvement and then the conscious mind has to deal with this feeling that is far stronger than most of what we feel on a day to day basis.

So to answer the question posed way back at the beginning of this post, these compulsions come from emotional impressions the mind cannot handle consciously.

But there is more to it than that. There is another emotion that acts as positive reinforcement of the compulsion, and that is what I will compulsive relief.

It feels very good to give in to the compulsion because the mind goes from a tense and conflicted state to a smoothly operating relaxed state in the blink of an eye.

Thsi good feeling is the reward the compulsion offers if you would only give in to it. Later, perhaps, when you think about those moments of tension, you will feel like you could have held out longer, but that’s only because the human mind has trouble relating to emotional states other than the one it is currently in.

Sure, when you’re relaxed and calm, you can imagine having all the resistance in the world to these compulsions because you are not currently experiencing  them.

But when you are experiencing them, they tax all your mental resources and you have far less ability to resist as a result.

Anyhow…. hmmm. I am sure I was going somewhere with all this…. oh well.

My personal experience with this dread has to do with taking refuge in routine in order to escape having to deal with my emotions. By running largely on autopilot and staying as far away from my triggering stimuli as possble, a space is left open in my mind for my conscious mind to operate.

I can even fool myself into thinking I am relatively sane… as long as I always do what my overblown PBC wants me to do.

But the moment I try to resist, I realize just how crazy I am.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Somewhere in this world lives the man who crushed me by raping me when I was 4.

There he is, living his life, free and clear, not giving a single thought to the life (or most likely, lives) he destroyed just to get his rocks off. To me, my rape was the primal trauma that formed the rest of my diseased and disturbed life, but to him it was just another Tuesday at the Spa.

Or maybe not. Maybe to him it was an extra good day because of that sweet opportunity that had fallen in his lap and how good it felt to cum really, really hard from that sweet pedo action. Maybe that was a banner day for him.

He must have felt like he won the lottery.

And he knew he would get away with it. Nobody believed kids back then. If I had told someone, I would have been the one who got in trouble for making up dirty stories to try to hurt an aduly. I would have been brutally shushed into silence on pain of severe punishment and forever being known as that “dirty boy”.

That’s why I talk about getting away with evil by doing the unthinkable. At that point in time, society’s desire to think things like my rape don’t happen would have been far too strong for an adult to fight, never mind a four year old child.

So for my rapist, this was not a risky act. This was, I can only presume, something he did whenever he could, and got a thrill from getting away with it.

I can only hope he never had kids. Or access to them.

So somewhere out there, my rapist lives, his crimes unknown. Or perhaps he has died in the interval – after all, that was forty years ago and he was at least an adult so that means he is probably at minimum sixty and quite possibly a lot older.

After all, the Spa was an exclusive club for middle class men. So he might have been any age at all.

Live or dead, though, he got away with it, and who knows what else. Even if I was his one and only victim (unlikely), the truth is there is no chance he will ever be brought to justice for the life he ruined that day in 1977.

Previous to the attack, I had nearly drowned because while I knew I was supposed to stay out of the deep end of the pool, I had no idea that there was a shallow edge around the pool, and so I followed that edge into the deep end and everything was fine until I turned around, fell off the edge, and into the deep.

Luckily, some stranger saw thing, dived in, and saved me.

Maybe it was the same guy who raped me. It’s certainly possible. Maybe he felt like I owed him. Or maybe having my helpless body in his heroic and manly arms gave him such a massive boner that he felt like he just “had to” act on it.

Newsflash, men : Erections don’t justify a thing. Nor do blue balls. True story.

Needless to say, my father was extremely grateful to the man who saved his youngest boy’s life and who might – MIGHT – have been about to be his rapist.

That brings up the whole subject of my father, and where the hell he was when the rape occurred. Why did he leave tiny four year old me in an adult sized shower stall – big enough for four men to shower at the same time – for the time it took for the gentleman in question to wreck my life forever?

For that matter, why the hell did he take me to the Spa with him in the first place?

I honestly cannot think of a completely innocent reason. It’s an action that makes no sense. Even if there was a very good reason for my Dad to be taking care of me alone at that point – like the rest of the family was off doing things I should not be around or would be a pest if I was around – why on Earth did he take me to this all male Spa which was more or less identical in facilities to the “normal” part of the one gay bathhouse I have been to?

He could have taken me to all kinds of normal kid places. Like Rainbow Valley, or the mall, or the park, or especially the beach.

But no. He took me to the one place where I would be surrounded by adult men in various states of undress then left me all alone in one of the stalls.

Bitch set me up. It’s the only answer that fits the facts.

After all, this was the Seventies, and all kinds of worthless sexual rules were getting discarded. It was a time when people were strongly encouraged not to pass judgment on how other people got off.

And my father has always been ambitious.

Maybe I was offered up to someone higher in the food chain than him with whom he wanted to curry favour.

Sure, that seems evil beyond imagination now, but hey…. it was the Seventies.

If so, he’s gotten away with it too. I couldn’t ever prove anything I have said tonight. I have no idea who my rapist was. I have no memory of anything about him. I wouldn’t even recognize his face.

That brings me to the last thing I want to talk about tonight : what would I do if I came face to face with this man in the proverbial dark alley? ^[1]

Kill him, maybe. But not in a state of rage. I don’t feel rage towards him. Perhaps I should. Perhaps if I did, it would be a sign of recovery because it would mean that I was more in touch with my id.

But at the moment, no, I don’t feel rage toward this man.

I feel loathing. A deep, dark disgust that is well beyond sanity and which could easily push me into committing horrible crimes upon this person.

I’d want to drown him in a lake of the toxins he put into me and watch him die knowing (because I would tell him) that he knew why he was dying and why he deserved it and why there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself because his fate was sealed back in 1977 when he hurt me and gave me that which I would use to destroy him utterly until there was nothing left of him at all, not even bone.

Or maybe I would destroy him another way by destroying his reputation in the world and then watch as he becomes a pariah and loses everything, and then has to live with the knowledge of why.

Either way, I would destroy him. I am not happy about that but there it is.

So he better hope I never find out who it was.

Because my darkness would drown him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time to talk about what a strange kid I was again.

First, let’s go over the list of oddities :

1. I never play-acted scenarios with my toys.  I have seen plenty of depictions of how normal children play in the media. They use their toys as props and characters for improvised storytelling in order to entertain themselves. Presumably, this is the result of a healthy instinct to explore social space in a safe environment. I never did this. I would not have seen the point. To me, toys were just physical objects that provided very little entertainment. The idea that I was supposed to add the entertainment myself would not have occurred to me.
2. I never had an imaginary friend.  I was far too literal-minded for that, Too logical. It’s like I never had a “magical” phase where reality was only limited by my imagination and where I could believe in things like imaginary friends. And yet I know having an imaginary friend is considered quite normal and healthy for kids in a certain age range. They must also come from some instinct to explore social space and develop the self via mirroring it in the imaginary friend. But I never did that. It was a total non-starter, because even as a preschooler I knew that said friend was not there. 
3. I never physically explored my environment in a hands-on way.  By that, I mean I never played in the sandbox, got into my father’s toolbox, played anything more active than Scrabble, or did anything else that would have stimulated me to develop a better relationship between my mind, my body, and my environment. Even before I became agoraphobic, when I would wander the neighborhood out of boredom, I was just a spectator. I looked at things. I eavesdropped on adult conversations. I’d find spots where the sun felt really nice. But I never played around with random physical objects or built things or anything else like that. That was yet another instinct that never kicked in or that I ignored.
4. I never feared nor respected the authority of adults.  I assumed myself to be their equals on a fundamental level. In that sense I have never experienced authority as I have seen it in others. I have never felt like there were people above me who know better than I do and who have my best interests at heart and therefore I should do what they say. Part of that must be a result of my being so bright – that gave me an enormous amount of intellectual self-confidence. But on another level, it’s yet another example of how social instincts (these ones hierarchical) never kicked in for me. And finally, the big one :
5. I never played with other kids.  As patient readers know, I was a very lonely child who had no friends. I didn’t know how to make friends and I didn’t have any of the usual activity-based opportunities because the other kids wanted to do things I did not enjoy – namely playing like a normal kid. As a result, my social isolation was nearly complete. I went to school and got great grades and came home and went to my room without interacting with anybody on any meaningful level. And this continued day after day of just trudging through life.

I’m sure there’s more but that will do for now.

One pattern is clear : I didn’t listen to my instincts. It’s tempting to say they weren’t there or never kicked in, but that’s not true. I think they were there but my too-logical mind filtered them out as noise.

Because they didn’t “make sense”. Why would I suddenly feel like doing something I had never done before and that involved a lot of risk? What an irrational thought. Better to just stay in my rigid mould and wait for this strange urge to pass.

Once again, I find myself saying : the idea of doing something just because I felt like it would not have occurred to me. That wouldn’t have “made sense”. These feelings frightened me for that very reason. They made me feel like I was going crazy, and by a far too strict definition, I was, because I had these urges to do things that did not make sense or seem logical.

To my nascent mind, following the instinct and seeing what happened would have seemed far too risky, though I doubt I would have been able to tell you what, exactly, I would have been risking.

Chaos, I suppose. Going from a known state to an unknown one. Walking a road without knowing where it goes.

Whbich brings me to the other pattern : exploration. Like I have discussed here before, I did very little exploring as a kid. I was too scared of everything.

This was not absolute, of course. I did explore a bit in certain situations. But for the most part, I went where I was told and stayed where I was put.

The trauma of being raped at the tender age of four left me, I think, with a completely shattered sense of safety and a very high background anxiety level. Between  this fear and my too-logical mindset, exploratory urges never stood a chance.

And that’s bad.  We have all these instincts for very good reasons and following them is vitally necessary for our psychosocial development. By reatreating into my mind and becoming such a timid and fearful kid who did not trust anything he could not predict and control, I was cut off from most of what would be considered a normal childhood.

And the worst part is that because I was so bright and well-spoken and intellectually self-confident, I didn’t come across as having any problems at all.

I was so desperate for any kind of validation that I presented only a bright, happy, appealing face to the world of adults.

Add in the fact that I was both timid and somewhat hard to deal with at times, and it’s no wonder that most adults chose to ignore me.

I couldn’t write a better formula for self-destruction.

But hey…. I was only a kid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

First, let’s get this out of the way. This is where the title of today’s blog entry came from :

Ah, good ol’ Kraft Dinner Lang. I used to dislike her intensely, but that was back when she was a shrill man-hating dyke who seemed to live to piss people off, and normally I am all for that if it;s properly focused, but hers was not.

But luckily, she evolved like a Pokemon into a modern mature and balanced lady and returned to her roots as a good ol’ Alberta gal who never stopped being super liberal (score!) but learned how to express it in a less grating way.

Anyhow. Where was I. Oh yeah, craving.

I’ve been having attacks of extreme hunger lately and as we know, that is a bad thing. It means that my insulin response is so lousy that the blood sugars are staying in my blood instead of ending up, via insulin, in my individual cells as fuel.

Glucose is nature’s fuel. Every living thing runs on it. It’s what powers our mighty mitochondria. But I have wandered off again.

The starving cells pump FEED ME messages into my bloodstream, and thus I get super frigging hungry, to the point where it feels like insanity.

Technically, an injection of insulin could help. After all, if the problem is lack of insulin response, the obvious solution would be to increase the insulin supply and hope that produces sufficient response.

But that sensible solution seems like insanity to me. I associate extreme hunger with dangerously low blood sugar and insulin reduces blood sugar (by letting it into your cells) and so an insulin shot seems like suicide to me.

So that’s not gonna happen. Cross that off the list.

Especially when it’s a problem I can solve by eating.  Eaiting is one of my favorite things! Why wouldn’t I just eat?

Because, of course, it’s not that fucking simple.

See, over years of grinding poverty, I became a person who simply did not eat between meals, ever, period.

It was the only way for me to be able to insure that I always had enough food. I had three meals a day. Three nice, predictable meals. And from that I could figure out what supplies I needed in order to keep myself from starving.

This is the kind of thinking I needed to employ if I was to survive on a welfare check. I had to look at any potential grocery purchase and figure out how many meals it would cover and from that how much it cost per meal.

It’s a rough way to live. I happened to have the math and resource management skills to do it in a semi-scientific fashion. But that didn’t make it any more fun.

The problem is that I am so constituted that any discipline I practice for a long time becomes a compulsion. One with a lot of force behind it. And once this prohibition on snacking became that deeply entrenched, reason has little chance of convincing me that it is okay to do it even if I totally could.

So no matter how hungry I get, unless I convince myself that I am in legitimate medical danger, getting myself to snack is extremely difficult. When I contemplate doing so, I feel like my whole world has been destabilized. That would throw an entirely new and unpredictable variable into all my equations and that scares me.

And I would feel guilty about it, too. Like I had done something irreponsible, short-sighted, and stupid. I would imagine how stupid I would feel in the future when I go to make one of my established meals and whatever snacked on wasn’t there.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But it is completely insane.

Because it pays no attention to the actual facts. It is stuck in a self-destructive zero sum feedback loop where more now always means less later and less later is always the epitome of blind and mindless stupidity and therefore is BAD  and I would be a BAD PERSON if I did it.

Luckily, I have been pondering the limits of the fear of feeling stupid in the future lately. Sure, it’s bad to realize you have done stupid shit that harms your long term self interest. But it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s not death.

And it certainly isn’t “smart” to make myself suffer in the name of some abstract notion of self-discipline when it is (big breath) completely possible that snacking might actually be the most rational, sensible, “smart” choice.

It’s sad how radical a notion that is to parts of me.

Blanket, “zero tolerance” prohibitions are almost always a bad idea because they make no allowances for changes of circumstances or advancement of thought. They are simplistic answers to complex questions and as such are dangerous as hell because they encourage following the rule while forgetting its purpose.

We have plenty of food here. I could go get myself a snack while I am waiting for my food to arrive.

Tonight’s special : sushi!

But very loud voices in my head shout crazy things like I will some how get “in trouble” with Joe if I eat anything beyond my assigned limited and that if I eat now I will spoil my appetite for the food that is coming.

Listen, Joe will never know that maybe we need to buy more apples like a third of a day earlier than usual and as for appetite, I am pretty sure I have a lot of it to spare now and therefore no need to worry about spoiling it.

That makes a lot of sense.

But does no go.

In fact, I worry about whether my compulsions will ever think I have “enough” of everything. I fear that I could have an entire Costco’s worth of food at my disposal and I would still feel compelled to try to make it last as long as possible by only ever eating the appropriate amounts at the appropriate times.

The only thing worse than being crazy is knowing you are crazy.

And the only thing worse than knowing you are crazy is feeling like you are crazy.

And the only thing worse than feeling like you are crazy is knowing you can’t do a goddamned thing about it.

And that’s the kind of thing that could drive a person insane.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have reached a certain bridge in my recovery and I feel like it’s a big one.

For a while now, I have been pondering the question of why I am so paralyzed by my depression. Why I find it so hard to actually do things.

Recently, I arrived at the point where I could ask myself the question, “Well why CAN’T I turn all the energies I feel within me into action? Why does it have to destructively flow inward and make me miserable instead?”

The glib answer would be “fear”, but that would be both asinine and useless. It’s deeper and more complex and yet, at the same time more primitive than that.

Right now, it feels like a mental cramp. One in the part of the brain that determines whether or not a given amount of personal energy is directed outwards or inwards.

Mine is stuck in the “inwards” position.

I suppose that’s not all bad. It’s what gives me my towering intellect and fertile creativity and all that jazz.

But none of that is worth a damn if I can’t actually do something with it.

I think that moat I think I mentioned before is to blame. That gap between me and others that got burned into the deepest levels of my psyche when I was raped as a child. Crossing THAT gap would be amazingly helpful.

But that would involved revisiting the memory of the event and I don’t know when I will be able to do that. Soon, I hope. It feels like soon.

I’ve never been closer to being able to do it, anyhow.

It’s this gap that forces the energy to flow inward. At that pivotal moment when the energies are rising towards action, they hit the point where to flow into actuality would require jumping over that gap and that’s where they die.

That where the fear is, too. I am terrified of what would happen if I crossed that bridge. It’s that paralytic dread kind of fear that is not attached to a specific potential consequence. Just the deep down feeling that Something Terrible will happen.

I guess I could force things through. But that might damage the vital system. I think it’s a better idea to simply stay the course and continue to carefully defuse the bomb in my head that is that memory of being raped.

After all, I am almost done.

Then again, I am getting pretty sick and tired of always doing the smart thing. It’s become too heavy a burden to bear, too small a cage to endure. Like I have said before, there is so much more to life than that which makes sense. I would be a fool not to open all the doors I need to open in order to make it to that bigger world.

My id has been stifled for far too long. I am a strong and healthy animal and I need to run free and feel the wind in my fur and feel truly, truly alive.

“Because it will make me feel better” should be enough, all things considered. I feel like at some point I lost the ability to even concieve of looking after my own psychological needs on anything like an active basis.

Instead, I keep myself sedated with my distractions. They drain enough of my excess inner energies for me to feel okay while I am doing them and that gets me through the day with relatively little pain, or at least, little pain that I consciously experience.

Underneath the hood it’s a freaking nightmare.

So now I ask myself the question : what would make me feel better right now?

Affection. Cuddles. Someone who loves and understands me and pays attention to me and is patient with me and who can handle exposure to my megawatt mind without getting freaked out. Someone who is not scared off by either my powerful presence or my many health problems. Someone who handle me.

So a boyfriend, essentially. Or at least some really good sex.

So what I desire most is connection with others. And through them, connection to all the good warm happy emotions I have been denied because of my psychological damage. I wnat to feel the warmth of human contact so that I can, at long last, finally come in from the cold and lay down by the fire and rest.

Maybe even finally get some true sleep. The knd that only comes when you feel safe enough to trust the world not to kill you in your sleep.

And I want this sense of connection and comfort more than anything else in the world. More than fame, money, a position in society, and a steady job combined.

I ave been waiting for such a long time.

What else would make me feel better. Fun, I suppose. Something active and e njoyable that will give me much needed positive input opposing my usual feeling that there is anything out there for me.

So like…. Disney World. I could have a hell of a lot of fun there, especially with some serious amount of spending money so I can buy or eat whatever. I loved my day at Disneyland so much that I am sure I would enjoy Disney World.

Or something a tad more mature, like attending some kind of academic event about a subject I like or really anywhere that I can find good, stimulating, interesting conversation with bright people who have agile minds and their own POV.

Or, of course, some place where I can get that sex I crave. Like the world’s most luxurious gay bathhouse. One with plenty of hot men into fat dudes so I can have as much of everything I want as I like.

An all you can eat man buffer, if you like.

Or hell, just a really good massage from someone who really knows their craft and has dealt with big huge guys like me before and knows how to make those nasty knots of tension melt away.

The point is ot get myself thinking in terms of what I want and what I need and possible routes to my acquiring the same.

Who knows, I might even learn to love myself in the process.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This afternoon was awful and for once it was not because of the heat.

I have a friend named Led. He seems to be somewhat of a misfortune magnet. The latest way the universe messed with him is that, desperate for cash, he risked his last two gallons of gas on a drive to a place that buys blood plasma.

Only to have them reject him because he had an injured thumb that was a little swollen, and they don’t take blood from visibly swollen people.

This, even though the very process of seperating the plasma from the rest of the flood filters out most inflections and the rest are easily screened for on a routine basis.

Anyhow, so there my friend is, stranded in the middle of nowhere because he didn’t have any money for gas and his gas tank is bone dry.

Really sounds like the sort of thing that would happen to me. I feel for the guy. And not just because I have a bit of a crush on him.

And I just cashed my check and put $100 on my reloadable visa, so I would have no problem sliding him $10 so he can at least get the hell home.

What could be simpler in this day and age, where billions of dollars are exchanged on a daily basis over the Internet and people buy stuff in the real world with their phones?

Well, here’s my list of things easier than that

1. Decrypting the Voynich Manuscript
2. Throwing a paper airplane into space
3. Winning a knife fight with a garbage disposal
4. Teaching a tornado the lambada
5. Walking through a rich white neighborhood when you’re coal black and not getting questioned by the cops
6. Stealing the One Ring from Mount Doom before it melts
7. Building a fully functional 3D printer out of papier mache
8. Surviving a fall from the top of the Empire State Building all the way to the ground while wearing a full, formal suit made of nitroglycerin
9. Juggling live hand grenades when you have both severe Tourette’s and bad case of the giggles and/or hiccups
10. Convincing Donald Trump he’s an idiot

Everything I tried to do to get him the money was immediately blocked by a dozen surprise obstacles suddenly popping up out of nowhere.

It was like one of those dreams where no matter how long you run, the end of the corridor never gets any closer, and in fact seems to be getting further and further away.

I know, I will PayPal him the money. Woops, I only have $4.75 in my PayPal wallet. Oh well, no prob, I will just transfer money from my reloadable to my PayPal wallet.

Nope. No dice. There is no option for that. What. the. fuck.  I can transfer money from my bank account but not my credit card.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy. I will just transfer money from my credit card to my bank account. Should be easy enough.

Nope. That’s not an option. Apparently, once the money is on the card, the only way to get it off again is by spending it.

And so forth and so on it went until I just plain had to give up. And you have no idea how hard it was for me to give up on someone in need. I felt like I was carving my own heart out of my chest.

But I just could not get there from here.

I get sleepy at the most random times lately.

Therapy today. I gave my therapistg the what-for about leaving me sans therapy for three fucking weeks. He was surprised, which was gratifying. He then told me about how few people were doing traditional one on one therapy any more and that he would have been hard pressed to find a locum even if that was the kind of thing psychiatrists did. And he gace me a “things are tough all over” sort of speech.

Dunno how much of it I believed, but the truth is that he is the only traditional therapist that takes public clients in Richmond. So it’s him or nothing.

I have got to get me some money so I don’t have to put up with this bullshit any more.

I told him about my latest mantra : “I’d rather be wrong than unhappy. ”

He didn’t get it right away. I am not surprised. It is the result of a very deep process that has been running inb my brain for a very long times and thus is not an easily graspable concept. The words are simple and easy to understand, but their rationale is not.

It’s simple. What I am talking about is the fear of being wrong. Of making a mistake.; It sounds like such a simple thing but it can burrow its way so deep into the mind that it paralyzes the individual almost completely.

After all, the only way to be sure you’re doing nothing wrong is by doing nothing. Right?

SO progress begins by being willing to make mistakes, or at the very least, willing to risk making mistakes and being wrong.

Even morally wrong. Contained within this idea is the possibility of doing things I will regret later and wish I had not done, and that includes morally incorrect things.

But I want to be happy. That’s the top priority bar none. I am done with being Gulliver in Lilliput, scared to move lest he hurt one of the tiny people all around him.

From now on, I am doing whatever makes me a happier person, and the goddamned Lilliputians will just have to learn to keep the fuck out of my way.

I am letting my beast out of its cage. I need more connection to my id. I have lived a cold and lonely life for far too long and I want to be alive for a change.

Even if that means I go out of control. Even if that means walking my path without knowing where it is going. Even if it means trusting my emotions to take me where I need to go. Even if I have to open every goddamned door, chest, and closet in my mind until I finally have enough of myself back to come back to life.

So watch out world. Hot stuff, comin’ through.

And fuck anything that gets in my way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A placid lake. Ducks fly overhead. Water lilies spin slowly in a lazy breeze. By the water, a fox naps on a sun-warmed rock. All is quiet and peaceful. The only sound is the gentle slapping of wave on shore. 

Suddenly, a rumbling from the bottom of the lake. The lake’s inhabitants barely have time to get out of the way before a massive, blocky spaceship roars out of the lake, climbing fast, water pours off it in huge gouts. 

At first, it rises with powerful majesty, like a king rising from his throne, but soon it is stooping skyward like a homesick angel, and withing moments, it disappears into the clear blue sky and nothing is left of it but a faint glow in the sky, which soon fades. 

All is as it was. 

Except that now, the USS Shining Star has once more risen from the pages of history to save the galaxy in its most desperate hour. 

And things will never be the same again. 

That image – the blocky space ship majestically emerging from the water – has been popping into my head a lot lately, so I thought I would share it.

It’s an intenselty positive and hopeful image in my mind. It’s an image of transcendence- of lifting myself out of my rut, my problems simply flowing away like water, and my emerging tstrong and powerful and amazing and ready to kick industrial quantities of ass at long last.

In my mind, it’s done anime style. I am pretty sure that’s where I got the image of the blocky spaceship that looks kind of like an office building covered in bright colorful circuitry patterns came from too.

The sory parts of it came to me as I wrote the thing down. I seem to have come up with something rather intriguing. The idea of this legendary spaceship that most people think is a myth suddenly emerging from where it has lain, waiting for the time of greatest need, would make a pretty good start for a novel.

And there would be so many questions to answer. Like, who is inside the thing? Does it have a full crew of human spacedogs? Or is it all rum by a single AI? Maybe the crew are robots, or aliens, or robot aliens.

Maybe not only is there no crew,  but if you were to cut up the side of it, all you would see insane is a big pink slab of meat that twitches and wriggles in its slime.

Or maybe there would be nothing. Nothing at all.

Doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that I would normally write, but then again, I am busy opening myself up to everything I can and therefore highly receptive to things which will lead to new patterns of existence.

Doing a story unlike anything I have ever written before could fit the bill perfectly. It’s something different and new, but not so huge a change that I balk at it.

And who know what this galactic King Arthur can do? Or the evil it will fight?

I can’t wait to find out.

Today’s blogging, part duex : La Saison Mauvaise! 

So there I was this afternoon, seething at my computer, filled with rage.

And I didn’t know why.

I have nothing new to be mad about. Just the same ol’ existential despair at my humiliating life and my inability to do anything about it and thoughts of radical solutions involving public nudity.

So, you know. Normal stuff like that.

But I had this growing burning hot rage and it made me hate the whole fucking world because everything hurts and I want to hurt it back and blah blah madness increasing maybe today is the day I finally go crazy.

I wasn’t too worried. True, this is an unusual event in my life, but I am going through some much needed changes lately and part of that is tapping into some of that vast reservoir of unexpressed rage and just dealing with the consequences and/or trying to keep it a controlled eruption that doesn’t send boiling hot lava and tar into any densely populated parts of my island.

Um. the one inside my head. Not the one I come from.

You know. This place.

But I was getting a little worried. I have a terrible fear of letting the rage volcano overflow the barriers into action and cause me to actually doing something crazy, so I had a little bit of concern that such a thing might be imminent.

But then it struck me why I burned with the white hot rage of a hundred suns.

It’s because I was really freaking hot!

I had once again forgotten that if season=summer,. afternoon=hell for me and so I forgot that I knew that all this was going to happen and, in theory, could have taken precautions against it.

Like moving to Alaska, for instance.

Like every year, I find myself pondering the wisdom of the siesta. What a smart thing it is to sleep through the worst part of the heat.

I can’t imagine sleeping ALL afternoon, though. I would feel like a third of my day had been stolen. Plus, the sort of sleep I get when it’s super hot out is not good.

The phrase “fever dream” comes to mind.

There’s more than one way to go through hell, and asleep is not one I would recommend to my worst enemy.

Not that I have enemies.

People have to care about you for that.

Plus they have dislike you, and I am pretty hard not to like. I am sweet, nonthreatening, silly, funny, charming, disarming, and a really nice person.

I guess if I am being honest, I probably do have enemies. Or at the very least, people who think I am annoying as fuck or full of myself or, heaven forbid, one of those people who “thinks they are smarter than everyone else. ”

But that is so not true! I don’t think I’m smarter than everyone else.

I mean, there’s over 7 billion people in the world. That’s a lot of competition.

I do, however, think I am smarter than most of the people I have ever met.

And I have the test scores to prove it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.