I had a nicer topic loaded into my brain, but then this one barged in and took over the joint, so I guess I gotta talk about it.

I just pulled yet another “me”. A Michael Bertrand special. Namely,. when I got back from dinner with Felicity, I looked down, didn’t see my keys, and said “Oh my god, I forgot my keys!”.

Humiliation enough for most people. But not for me! No sirree!

So Felicity is nice enough to call up to the apartment and ask Julian if he can come down and let me in.

After all, he’s done that for me so many times before.

But exactly one second after Julian says “Sure!”, I realize that I actually do have my keys, they are exactly where they were supposed to be, and the only reason I didn’t see them when I looked down was because the motion of the car had caused them to slip over to one side of my massive gut.

D’oh. Once more, I leapt to a panicky negative conclusion based on far too little evidence, went off half-cocked^[1], and made a fool of myself.

Now I am not super upset about that. Everyone involved knows me and knows that I am absentminded as hell and hopefully they consider it part of my signature charm.

And cute. :Like a helpless kitten with its paws caught in yarn.

But note that dignity is not part of that equation. And I am not talking about some toweringly alpha attitude stuffed with gravitasse and importance.

I am talking about the very modest amount of dignity that comes with not making an idiot of myself on a regular basis.

The dignity of the mildly competent would be a huge step up for me.

Now let’s quickly run through the usual thoughts I have about this

1. I’m not competent to look after myself and there is nobody else to do it for me
2. I need some kind of assistant
3. AFAIK, I am helpless to stop this
4. My life is a never ended series of humliations and embarassments.
5. Woe is me et al

I think that covers it. Now on to fresh work.

I think the main thing to focus on is that this flaw of mine make me worthless as a human being. Nor does it make me a liability to those who know me, or that nobody can ever have any respect for me, or any of the other crazy shit my bad chemicals tell me.

Everyone has flaws. Nobody is perfect. My flaw happens to be somewhat comical. If I could jump into my childhood dreams and become the wacky side character that everyone loves in a sitcom, it would be one of my characteristic flaws,

Like Urkel’s lack of boundaries on Family Matters, or Don Knott’s absurdly exaggerated machismo on the Andy Griffith show, or Norm’s determinedly low ambition life on Cheers. These are not what positive traits in the straght-ahead obvious sense.

But they nevertheless make the characters more likeable because it makes them more human and hence more relatable.

I like to think that I have that kind of charm.

And yeah, it hurts to be destined to a life of these sorts of events, but only if I take them too seriously. That is, if I continue to feel like every single incident like this is some kind of damning evidence that I am some form of horrible person and don’t serve to be around people any more.

Oh yeah. Wouldn’t my social anxiety love THAT.

But if I just slow down and calm down about the whole thing, I will realize that these things are no big deal and they only have the power I give them and that I am a pretty amazing dude otherwise, so what’s the big deal?

That involves reconciling my feelings and the truth, which is something I have been doing a lot of lately.

It is sobering to realize one is crazy like that. TO know that, despite my pretensions of wisdom and objectivity and the pats on the back I give myself for being able handle seeing things as they really are. I am just another deluded fool.

Except my delusions make me feel worse.

Being crazy might look like fun sometimes, but few of us are so lucky.

Uh. Sundown is making me sleepy. Only 45 years old and I am already sunsetting.

Well I always was ahead of my age group.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Being insane.

The good news is that now that I am aware of these… let’s say errors, I can fix them. For me, that is a matter of letting the reality of the situation seep in and displace the craziness and bizarre emotional distortions.

This might not be enough, though. There is also the “need to panic” angle.

I think that panic attacks can serve a vital role in one’s emotional ecology because as unpleasant as they are (and they can be nightmares), they nevertheless provide a form of catharsis and allow the brain to discharge the excess emotional energy of someone loike me who has a lot of repressed feelings.

It’s like those naturla gas wells that periodically burn off the excess gas coming up from below by burning it off. Or a Jacob’s Ladder discharging the overcharge accumulated between the anode and the diode.

The best thing about my metaphors is that they are so relatable.

The superior solution would be not to accumulate the overcharge in the first place. Otherwise known as learning to express my emotions.

I am um, working on it.

It’s hard to beleive that normal people more or less manage to do it. They express their emotions at roughly the same rate as they generate them. How does that even work?

I think the key is that they actually act on their emotions. In fact, act according to their emotions instead of being an emotionally constipated egghead like myself.

Is it too late for me to convert?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just watched the animated feature “Sing” with my roomies and it has me all full of joyful happy sunshine-y vibes, so I am tossing out my original plan for tonight’s blog and instead I am just going to let loose my tendency to gush and talk about the flick.

Seriously. The title was going to be “Maybe I Am Not Such A Nice Guy After All”. But fuck that darkness shit. For tonight, I am going to embrace the light.

Heck, I’m gonna hug the daylights out of it!

So. The flick.

Loved it, loved it, loved it. It is full to the brim with warmth and heart and depth and understanding and wit and wackiness and just about everything else I love.

Oh, and deep within its heart flows the magic and spirit of the theatre.

But more than that. it is the spirit of The Show. 

The Show is much more powerful than its venue. Note that people do not say “the theatre must go on”. The Show taps into something very deep in the human spirit that dates back to the days when primitive hunter gatherers would return from the hunt and hold the tribe spellbound as they reenacted the day’s adventures for them.

I talked about this in the following video.

Short version, the show must go on because while the show is in production, it is basically the religion of everyone involved. It’s rare that modern life provides a shared, common goal with a clear timetable combined the powerful magic of group endeavour and group hardship to make something far, far greater than the sum of its parts.

And it is all held together by The Show. Therefore, The Show has to happen. Otherwise, all the good feelings and the power of the group to supercede the individual (in a wonderful way) will turn into frustration, bitterness, and despair.

Personaly, I would much much rather have a show bomb like Nagasaki and close after the first night than not happen at all.

And the movie totally gets this. It gets it to the point of having the show in the movie recover from what seems like a total disaster that they could never come back from.

It’s been a long time since anything made me genuinely wonder how the heck the heroes were going to get out of the situation, but this movie did it.

When the big disaster happens, it really seems like that has to be it. And the way they recover from it is something I never would have thought of in a million years.

So in addition to everything I have said about the movie, it is also quite fresh and original. You have seen many of the elements before, especially if you have ever watched the old 1940s “show” musicals like A Star Is Born, but the excellent writing and execution makes it all fresh and new and full of bright and shiny happy energy again.

Wow, it is amazingly hard to resist the urge to now point out the movie’s imperfections. I really want to do it. But I am not going to.

I am staying positive and resisting the impatient urgings of both my depression, which instinctively attacks all things that are good and positive as a threat to its regime, and my unstoppably analytical mind, which can’t stop thinking about something until it has reached and outputted to my conscious mind a firm valuation of it.

Well fuck that. Know how I keep asking people if they would rather be right or happy? Well I am living it now. I am determined to be happy, dammit, and if being perfectly objective and accurate about everything gets in the way, it will have to go.

I mean, what good is all this Truth if I am miserable? I’d rather be deluded, thanks.

So here we good. Positivity I can do this.

Um, how many words left? 340? Oy.

More about the movie, then. The characters are great. Each one has their own unique backstory and personality. And yet they are all easy to identify with as well.

This is so hard. I have to fight the urge to start a paragraph with “Overall…” or “On the other hand… ” or “I’m not saying the film is perfect…”.

It’s almost comical, really, this internal battle to remain positive. I feel like I am defiantly pushing down on the scale with my thumb and looking around like I am just waiting for somebody to try to judge me about it.

Oh, and speaking of scales, when I was at the doctor’s office on Wednesday, I stepped on the scales and found out that I only way 313 pounds now.

That’s way less than I thought I weighed. Last time I got weighed (which as admittedly aaages ago) I weighed around 335. So, boffo on that.

And afterwards, I got myself some of the fruit juice freezies that I love so much in the summer. They are sugar free, being mostly just fruit juice and, I assume, some kind of stabilizer to keep it from freezing into big flavourless crystals.

And they are delicious. I would much rather have fruit juice than anything artificial anyhow, even back when sugar was not a factor.

Just deleted a whole paragraph for being too negative. The struggle continues.

I pretty much have the whole sugar free sweet things on lock now. I get sugar free cookies in many varieties at Sav-On. Every 7-11 has three different varieties of sugar free ice cream, and I even know where to get sugar free ice cream sandwiches.

Even the fact that those exist makes me feel better about the world.

So you could say my life is pretty sweet right now, and you’d be right. I have sweet foods in my life, it’s summer, I have video games I enjoy playing, I have friends that I enjoy hanging out with, and a nice soft bed to sleep on every night.

Life is good.

And that’sall I have to say about it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Feeling bloated and bleh at the moment. Depressed too, I suppose, but it’s the nihilistic form of depression on the low intensity setting, so it’s hard for me to find the energy to bother saying I am depressed,. It just seems like too much work.

Been thinking about the awfulness inside me today. It’s amazing how little it matters that I know that being sexually assaulted as a four year old was not my fault and did not make me a dirty and terrible thing nobody could love.

It’s how I feel, nevertheless. SOme part of me was soiled by the event and that has poisoned me for so long that I don’t know how to imagine myself as worthy and pure.

I mean, what would that even be like? What would be left of me? Who would I be?

And there is a sick comfort to being at the bottom. It means you are safe from falling. It means you are safe from disappointment too. The toxic truth is I have felt like a horrible thing for most of my life.

And not without cause, because I was treated like one.

Imagine being the kid that no one even wants to touch. The kid everyone dreads when people are picking partners for things in school. The social pariah that get mocked, bullied, and brutalized and even the adults think he deserves it.

Now imagine, at the same time, being the smartest kid your school has ever seen. The kid who tests off the scale for IQ and other mental skills. The kid who does his schoolwork with a contemptuous flair because it does not even begin to challenge him in the slightest.

The kid who is too socially clueless to understand how much that makes people hate his guts. Including his teachers. Getting better grades that people who have to work very hard to even pass. Showing zero deference to adults, treating them like equals. Making it very clear that he was cooperating voluntarily with the educational system and that at any moment, he might choose to withdraw that cooperation and there was nothing they could do about it.

I mean, who the fuck did I think I was?

One of the reasons for my feelings of toxicity, I think, is what I will call the “stagnant water” effect. My busted social antenna means that I do not have the kind of outlet for my emotions that a socially intact person has.

So it all stays with me instead, my self-pollution building up to septic levels with no sign of stopping. It’s like not being able to eliminate waste on a physical level.

I trust I need not be more specific than that.

Actually, it’s more like kidney disease of the soul. Our kidneys filter out toxins and then remove them from out bodies by releasing them into our urine.

But for my psyche, both the input and output valves are sluggish and clogged and not really up to the tasks of letting in what I need and getting rid of what I don’t.

So the same bad water recirculates endlessly except for these moments every day that I spend talking to you wonderful people, who give me the ablity to let some of the badness inside me out by writing this blog.

And the more I write, the more I can express with every word, and the better an outlet it becomes. For everything, not just the bad stuff.

Seems so strange that I am this wizard of words with all these powerful verbal skills and yet I still have a lot of trouble expressing my real emotions.

Maybe it’s because I am ashamed of them. I don’t know.

I have been trying to get off the depressive self-loathing carousel lately. The key is to somehow broker a peace deal between my disability and my ambition.

I want so bad to get out into the world and make something of myself, and yet the illness holds me back. The frustration this causes ends up venting internally (naturally) and turns into self loathing as I exoriate myself over what I “should” be doing.

Note that this valuation does not take what I could be doing into account.

And how crazy is that?

There’s a reason for it though. The problem is that I cannot accept that my depression limits my prospects in life. I absolutely must believe that things will get better for me some day and that I will be able to join the working world and get a real life when I am healthier.

If I stopped believing in that future, I would kill myself, because otherwise what is the fucking point of going on.

For ten, maybe twenty more years of this pathetic bullshit existence? Um, no thanks.

Come what may, I am getting out of this prison cell of a life. I can’t keep on living like this.

So some day, I will stop. One way or another.

And I know I might be self-sabotaging with this attitude. I acknowledge that, on paper at least, I might be better off giving up on my lofty dreams and, like my brother said, just trying to make some kind of life for myself.

But I can’t. Not yet, anyhow. I have to believe that there’s a key to this cage and if that keeps me from simply making it the nicest, safest, most comfortable cage I can, so be it.

My ambition may burn too hto for my own good but it also provides the only light I have in my life. I have to believe that one day I will be well and able to finally, finally, FINALLY become a real adult with a job and a husband and a home.

And possibly many, many cats.

Otherwise I might as well get the whole thing over with. Subtract myself from this world and by doing so making it a cleaner, healthier, happier place.

Or at least that is the heat of the meat
Of all those poisons I secrete.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s talk about the British Disease^[1], shall we?

I call it emotional constipation. People end up with all kinds of emotions they desperately want to express but cannot because, that would involve breaking a thin but incredibly strong web of unspoken and often unexplainable taboos that tell the person that this is something that Is Not Done and that to do so would be to pollute the emotional commons formed by these taboos that lets people pretend that everything is calm and wholesome and good.

And the thing is, they are not wrong. Public displays of emotion may well earn them the wrath and disdain of their peers. There is a feeling that to spill out one’s uncontrolled and deeply felt emotions in public is akin to soiling oneself and the person doing it should be equally ashamed of themselves for losing control and ruining the facade for everyone.

This is, of course, insane.

It’s insane because it’s inhuman. And unhealthy. We all know that repressing emotions rarely turns out well and that we should tell the ones we love that we love them more often and that expressing those emotions can make us feel a hell of a lot better.

But still, we withhold. Why?

Let’s jump into that rabbit hole.

We shall start with the base : fear. Fear keeps us from expressing our emotions.

But fear of what? Making oneself vulnerable, of course.

OK. But vulnerable to what? What is the malevolent force just waiting to takte advantage of this vulnerable moment to do us grievous emotional harm?

That’s where this gets tricky.

because if you asked someone if they thought there was some kind of force waiting to pounce on their every vulnerability, most people would find the notion laughable. At most, they would call it “life” or “the world” or “people in general”.

But we nevertheless believe in it, whether or not we even think it exists. We believe in it so strongly that we will suffer agonies of the soul rather than give it a chance.

So what the hell is it?

I think that the key here is our social competition instincts. We all know we have them but modern pluralistic society, where the vast majority of people are middle class and thus roughly the same in social standing, does a good job of hiding and discouraging these instincts.

There’s a reason why “social climber” is a derogative.

These instincts tell us that we always have to be on guard foir our social rivals and that we must be prepared to defend our current social rank to the death, if necessary, in order to keep the status that we have or some social rival will come take it from us.

And as I have said before, for human beings a loss of rank can feel like death. Worse than death, in fact, because you’ll still be around to suffer the consequences. Even the tiniest loss of perceived status can make us feel like our lives are on the line.

Hence all the microaggressions of middle class life, where everyone is competing for social superiority in what amounts to a ludicrously tiny arena.

But the size of the arena doesn’t matter because these social status measurements are all relative. It’s not a matter of climbing to the highest absolute height.

It’s a matter of climbing higher than THEM. You know…. those people. The awful people with their bad taste and poor manners who have the GALL to act like that might be better than us.

We hate those people. Even though they are more or less exactly like us.

And this is where all the fretting over who has the nicer lawn or who has the bigger TV or who gets that coveted corner office or who throws the cooler parties or who has the best toys.

And while it is the most visible in the middle class, it happens all through society. You could be living in a tent community for the homeless and people would be still be fretting over who has the nicer tent or who is better at finding stuff to sell or a million other petty things.

But it reaches a true fever pitch with the rich because they have so little else.  The entire lower portion of Maslov’s Hierarchy is so ridiculously well taken care of that for them, the bottom most level is the social level.

So they have the green and the purple levels down pat. The sad truth is that they often become so obsessed with the light blue levels that they neglect the yellow and the orange entirely. 

The rich end up structurng their entire lives, including how they raise their children, around these minute social distinctions. Generation after generation is raised wit the deep and certain knowledge that it is their job to contribute to the familys social status as much as possible and that is more important than absolutely anything else, including their own health.

My, I have wandered far afield.

Back to the point : we feel making ourselves vulnerable in part because, regardless of our actual situation,. our social instincts tell us to always be on guard against our social rivals who are just waiting for an opportunity to do us social harm and push us down so they can rise up.

Another reason we fear vulnerability, though, is that we really are vulnerable to emotional harm in these instances. We all have the same formative traumas where we made ourselves vulnerable to the wrong person and/or at the wrong time and been emotionally devastated by the result.

So there is real risk. It might not seem like a “real” risk to the thuddingly ignorant, but for us human beings, it is very real.

I seem to have come to two separate but not mutually exclusive conclusions.

Feel free to combine them in whatever proportions make the most sense to you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been thinking about my own strangeness lately.

It’s funny how I have been called weird my whoile life and learned to accept and even embrace the label without ever really wondering what, exactly, it means.

For me specifically, that is. Everyone knows what it means in general.

Now that I am thinking about it, I can feel my own strangeness as an element of my psyche. It’s a cold, blank feeling. Like something is supposed to be there but instead there is just a sign that says “404, normal human emotions not found. ”

Alienation would be a good term for it. But it is neither something entirely about my being alienated from the population nor is it all about them alienating me.

It’s about both. And then some.

How many times have I talked about the terrible gap that opens between me and other people when I say something that seems normal to me but is beyond bizarre to them?

And what do I describe them doing? Looking at me like I was an alien.

And it’s more than mere eccentricity. People can handle that. They just mentally label you as weird and move on.

No, I say things that crash their minds. Things that come from somewhere so outside their frame of reference that I might as well be an actual alien and they literally have no idea what to say to what I just said.

Actually, if I was a literal alien, they would probably handle it better because then they would have some kind of warning. Of course an alien is going to say some really weird shit that you don’t underdstand.

It’s an alien! What did you expect?

Makes me want to get a pair of these and see if it improves my social standing.

Hey, my eyes are down HERE, buddy.

Okay, maybe not.

But I have been thinking about social presentation lately, and how to give people some kind of idea what they are dealing with when they first meet me.

My deafualt mode is to remain somewhat inscrutable, underneath the charm and the openness and such. I love to keep people guessing.

It’s an extension of the ferocious individuality I have discussed previously. I don’t want to be labeled by people. I don’t want to be reduce to a category or a type. I want to be taken as myself, a unique individual, at all times.

SO I instinctivelt defy categorization.

And that sounds good and is totally in keepoing with the the founding principles of our modern, democratic, individualist societies.

But it’s actually myopoic and self-destructive and just plain wrong. Horribly wrong.

Because those labels exist for a reason. They are not meant to, as my fucked up mind would tell me, smother my individuality under a blanket of herdlike groupthink. ^[1]

No, the labels give people somewhere to start when getting to know you. They take you from being a total stranger to someone they at least know a few things about. This gets them past the inherent fear of strangers that society works so hard to suppress and conceal. It establishes a connection. People can add you to their filing system.

Looking at it that way makes me think back to all the times in my life when someone has been asking questions that are clearly meant to help them get to know me but I smugly remained blankly enigmatic instead, treating it like a game.

It makes me cringe. So god damned WRONG.

And the truly shudder-inducing thing is that, in my mind, this made me a fascinating person whom people would love to get to know better so they can find out who I really am and what makes me so…. different.

Um, NO. If people can’t fit you into the categories in their minds, they push you OUT of their minds and go look for a normal person who makes sense to them, like a square peg falling out of a square hole because it just doesn’t fit in.

And because this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, they will find the whole experience disturbing and will want to forget all about it as soon as possible.

So I can sit around and bitch about how isolated I am and how poor little tragic me has been left all alone in the cold cruel world, but the truth is that when people do try to get to know me, I treat it like a game and shut them down most cruelly.

It’s cruel because I don’t just tell them to fuck off or otherwise give them a clear signal of my boundaries. Instead, I play the disengenuous ghost, like I have so often done.

What do you mean, you find me weird? But I am being friendly, engaged, interested, and open. What’s so weird about that?

For fannish reference, see Garak from Deep Space Nine. He and I have a lot more in common than a naked lust for Doctor Bashir.

Those eyes…. so dreamy….

Even when I am, by sheer luck, managing not to say anything that breaks people’s brains or breaking some social rule that people weren’t even aware of till I broke it, I think people sense a wrongness in me.

It is a low level version of the same strangeness people feel around people further along the autism spectrum. It engenders the same sort of fear that insanity does. The feeling that this person is dangerous because they are unpredictable and might do anything at any time.

In essence, it breaks through the siren song of civilization and awakens that fear of strangers I mentioned earlier. Most people have no idea this song is even playing and we do not have a word for what it is or what it suppresses.

So people reject us weirdos without even understanding why. That’s why they can’t explain what the strange person is doing or has done wrong.

They don’t know themselves. It’s purely emotional. But very hard to ignore.

And the worst part of it is that the lines we cross are completely invisible to us. Therefore even with the best of intentions, we can’t help pissing people off.

To them, we are like highly excitable large dogs who might suddenly knock over the furniture or bowl them over or even thoughtlessly savage them, all the while wagging our tails, oblivious.

You might love the heck out of that dog. And it can truthfully be said that the dog intends no harm and is not trying to hurt anybody. The dog, in that sense, is innocent.

But you would be forgiven for maybe not wanting that dog around, nonetheless.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Has nothing to do with whatever it is I will end up talking about today. Just happens to be the bit of music currently stuck in my head.

Yes, it’s Nickelback. And I like it. Fight me, nerds!

First, an update : what did you know, my Xbox customer actually DID get back to me via email, and we will be doing the deal at 4 pm today.

She will be a happy Xbox owner and I will be $200 richer. Pretty frigging sweet.

I am going to end up putting most of it on “the card”, as I call it. That’s my reloadable Visa. It is my default savings account, as opposed to my actual savings account, which has the distinct disadvantage of not being nearly as easy to use on the Internet.

I suspect around $150 of it will make it to the card, if not more. Added to my current balance, I will have around $270.

This is starting to look like real money.

Not, sadly, enough to get me home for a couple weeks this summer. That takes at least a thousand bucks. And I have neem feeling terribly homesick lately.

I think it’s the coming of summer that’s causing it. All this sunshine and green makes me want to be back in my homeland of Prince Edward Island where I could hang out with my family and enjoy the weather.

I miss my family terribly. Especially my mother.

Oh, another update : remember that advice column bit I got so het up about?

Well I still think it is a lovely idea but the flame burning in me to do it has gone out. I curse the fact that my inspirations can be so fragile.

When I posted that entry, I was all fired up to go buy the domain, make the website, then post to the Dan Savage forums in order to get the whole thing started.

Well I bought the domain and went to install WordPress on it but my new domain did not appear on the list of possible WordPress domains.

What the fuck.

I got on live text chat with tech support for my web host, and the nice fellow told me that new domains can take up to 24 hours to fully register.

FUCK. Already, I could feel my momentum draining away, and once that’s gone, it’s gone, baby. The moment has passed and it’s never coming back.

But hey, at least I could go register for Dan Savage’s forums so I would be ready when I finally did get a chance to installed WordPress etc.

Dan Savage doesn’t have forums any more.

In fact, I knew this. He shut them doiwn because internet, basically. Because they got all full of flame wars and trolls and people being awful and such.

Well boom went THAT idea. There was no way I was going to be able to maintain a desire to do it in the face of a complete inability to do anything about it. The flame died down and went out. Game over.

And lordy, do I wish it didn’t work that way with me. It’s unfair that I have to do something alien to my nature, namely act immediately, without time to think about it, in order to capture the lightning in a bottle known as actual action.

My, that was a mess.

Actually, the situation isn’t quite that bad.The problem is not that I failed to catch that lightning, it’s that I opened the bottle too soon.

I am quite capable of storing inspiration for short periods of time. It burns and give me a feeling akin to blue balls but I can do it.

But once it is unleashed it has to be put to work immediately or it dies. And like I said, when it dies, it can never come back.

So the exact same idea that I was so pumped up again Friday night is dead to me now. Still a great idea. Still could turn into something amazing.

And iyet, it is Not. Gonna. Happen.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so absolute about it. I might find it in me to start things up again some time soon. I might be able to turn that inspiration into a dream, a big beautiful shiny dream, and those have much more staying power with me than inspirations.

I am so sleepy. And I got plenty of sleep last night. It’s not fair. It’s like I can never truly catch up. I am always running low on sleep.

The sleep apnea probably accounts for a lot of that. But the depression is a big factor too. To suffer from depression is to be at constant war with your own mind and that conflict continues when we are sleep.

That’s why we are tired all the time, by the way. First the struggle drains us of our energies during the day, then it wrecks our sleep at night.

It’s a truly horrifying illness.

And I wonder at the prospects for peace. On the surface of it, this would seem to involve a total surrender to the depression. That’s clearly not going to happen.

That kind of thing could kill me.

But perhaps the struggle can be ended without surrender. A peace treaty, perhaps, hammered out by both sides listening to the other and doing their best to come to a mutual understand and a plan for disarmament.

That would be the solution if this was Star Trek.

But when both sides are you, as is the mediator, it ain’t that simple.

Maybe it starts with legitimizing my depressive feelings. Not acting on them or believing them, just admitting that they have a purpose and a point and doing my absolute best to figure out what they are trying to tell me.

All my demons are incomplete thoughts and/or emotions. If they could only complete their missions, they would disappear.

The backlog is huge. But each message heard brings relief.

That alone makes it worth doing.

But will I actually do it?

We will have to wait and see.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wasn’t sure what to write about tonight and was thinking a life update might be in order, but thebn I thought of that title and I loved it so much it sealed the deal.

Anyhow, tonight, I will do one of my rare but always boring life updates in a vain attempt to give myself the impression that I do things.

Ignore the negativity, folks,. When I say stuff like that, it’s purely to let the bad stuff out.

It actually makes me feel a lot better. How messed up is that?

So, life. Loathe it or ignore it. What’s up in mine recently.

Well I am finally getting aroud to selling that Xbox One S : Minecraft Edition that I won last Xmas from the McDonald’s Monopoly game.

I put it up for sale on the local craigslist and got five offers almost immediately. I was pleased because my depression was telling me that nobody would response, that I was asking for too much money ($200), and that it would all end in heartbreak and ruin.

Now you know why it took me so long to get around to selling the damned thing.

Now I have never sold anything online before, so I didn’t know what to expect. And the first thing that surprised me was something that is obvious if I tell you about it but that had never occurred to me before putting something up for sale and getting multiple offers on it.

Namely, that now I had to choose who got it.

That wasn’t a responsibility or a decision I had anticipated, even though, as I said, it seems pretty obvious to me now.

Honestly, I blame the depression. When you don’t think you will even get one offer, the last thing that will occur to you is what to do with multiple offers.

SO I experienced a short but painful period of existential strife and self-pity before making the obvious decision to do it on a first come first served basis.

Should there have been -‘s in that phrase?

So I contacted the first person who offered. And then I encountered the second unexpected problem : what if said person tends to be somewhat of a flake?

Nothing horrible, kust taking like two or three days to respond to an email. That drags things out in a most annoying fashion and makes it impossible to actually schedule a time to meet up and do the deal because by the time she replies, whatever date and time I have suggested has passed into the past.

I got so frustrated that I actually contacted the next person in line to buy the thing. Bad idea, because what if she actually emails me after that?

And she did. So I had to tell the second person um, nope, sorry. Lesson learned.

I think I am closing in on the deal now. She has given me her phone number in the latest email, so if push comes to shove, I can call her.

That will take a bit of doing, given my social anxiety, but I have a very powerful medicine to help called MONEY.

Calling a stranger becomes way easier when there’s two hundred bucks in it for me. Makes that hesitation just melt away,.

For the most part.

So I will call her tomorrow afternoon and see when is good for her. That’s if she doesn’t email me back before then, which seems probable.

I want the money dammit!

And I am proud of myself for going through with it at last. I did it like I often do things lately, by more or less grabbing myself by the scruff of the neck and tossing myself into it faster than my fears could stop me.

It’s a harsh image, but apt.

I’ve called it “kamikaze mode” in the past because in order to do this kind of thing, I have to put myself in a state of mind where I don’t give a fuck about the consequences, I am throwing myself into it shouting “Banzai!” and hoping to die for my Emperor.

In a strictly metaphorical sense, of course.

And I amd glad I have this mode. It lets me short circuit all the fear and hesitation and paranoia that normally keeps me from doing stuff and just go’er.

But it might also be called “fanatic mode” because it is a lot like a brief attack of mania in that I feel great in a way that could be quite dangerous because in that state, I am immune to fear and capable of anything.

I’m riding the thrill of the moment, the sheer insanity of it all, and that’s a scary place to have to go just to make a freaking phone call.

But ya know…. I do like I do.

In other news, I also finally got around to the medical testing my GP assigned me a month ago and which I pertly asserted I would do the next day.

It went fine. One thing I noted was that the lab near where I live had been rearranged to be a heck of a lot more like the health center I used to go to as a child.

Gone were the little examing-room niches with their harshly clinical feel and gone was the office minimalist look of the decor too.

Instead, all was wooden partitions and carpets and nice ladies with warm smiles.

I instantly felt at ease. It was like I had redecorated it myself. I know how people like me can be made nervous by an excess of the clinical look.

It’s not a rational thing. Rationally, you would think I would want everything to be as gleamingly antisceptic as possible so that I am sure I will not get infected.

But no. What I want is a place that seems warm and human, like it’s someone’s living room that just happens to have a bunch of little stations where people just happen to be there to take your blood or whatever.

To top it off, the nice lady who took my blood did so with such smooth efficiency and accuracy that I barely felt a thing.

For someone who has the kind of veins that like to hide and therefore has a lot of memories of inexpect phlebotomists stabbing again and again, and even wriggling the damn thing around in there in search of my blood.

It is amazing that, after all that, I am still not afraid of needles. I am not happy about them but they do not scare me like they do some people.

There was also an issue with not having a urine sample in me because I foolishly took a leak on the way out of my therapist’s office, but I solved that via a method I will delicatelty describe as “one thing squeezing another” And it worked like a charm.

So everything was fab. That was a good day.

I look forward to the next one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Many times in my life, I have wondered if it was a gift or a curse to have a sense of order and how things should be done.

Because it’s very hard to make that sense entirely happy. And I am lucky in that mine is not particularly strong and is somewhat restrained by my ferocious pragmatism.

I say somewhat because while the pragmatism holds back the more irrational kinds of impulses (more in that later),. it is powerless against when things are truly being done wrong on something that matters.

So while I can mostly dismiss the little things, like the fact that no two clocks in our clock filled home show the same damned time, larger things like bad design in public works can get under my skin despite my defences.

Usually, I calm myself out of that kind of thing by my own version of the Pragmatist’s Prayer Against Perfectionism, which goes something like :

It’s fine. It’s fine. It works well enough. Not everthing has to be optimized. Everyone is happy with how it is and whatever injustice against efficiency I am obsessing over is not that big a deal. Just because you can see how to make it better does not mean that the current version is wrong. Just caaaaalm dooown.

And I need this sort of mantra because I can easily become obsessed with small things that matter little because of how my mind automatically analyzes how things work and flags what it considers “errors”.

It’s like I am proofreading the entire world.

But I have it under control Mostly. It helps that I have sympathetic friends who will listen to me rant about petty ineffiencies that are bugging me.

One of the most vitally important things one can do for a friend is indulge their neuroses. Listen while they vent their obsessions and they, in turn, will listen while you vent yours. And then you will both feel more sane after.

Sometimes, you just got to let the crazy out. It build up inside like steam pressure and starts interfering with the normal functioning of the mind.

I suppose that included sexual craziness too. People need a way to get whatever kind of sex will fulfill their needs in order to be happy, healthy individuals.

That’s why I truly believe that sexual freedom and indulgence could make the world a far better place. If everyone could get their collective rocks off in the manner of their choosing, people would be so much happier and calmer and less likely to start wars or say mean things.

But we put so many needless barriers in the way and lade people will guilt over things which are in no sense wrong.

Your sexual needs could involve a sprig of parsley, a full sized circus trapeze setup, and a gallon and a half of duck shit, and it would still be morally fine.

I wish more people got that. It would make the world so much better. Everyone would get as much as they want of whatever they need and nobody would be judged for whatever the hell that was ever because everyone would be cool.

Hmmm. I have been pondering the idea of starting an advice column for quite a long time and I think I might have just figured out my angle.

I could start the advice column for all the questions people feel are too dirty, weird, shameful, or humiliating for other advice columns. Questions involving extreme kinks that regular advice columnists will not touch because they are too fucked up for their readers and represent far too small percentage of their readership to be worth grossing out or offending the rest of them.

I’d call myself Mother…. something. Something starting with M that gets the idea of an all forgiving maternality. A motherliness that loves and accepts and supports you no matter what you enjoy doing with your genitals.

A motherliness that sees you as you really are and loves you all the more for it.

Mother Eternal, maybe? It’s not an M word but it flows well and echoes “maternal”.

I will think about it.

I would get the thing started by haunting the forums for Dan Savage’s column and posting that if anyone has questions they would never ask Dan because if anyone ever knew about their thing they would just DIE, they can ask me instead.

I can promise them absolutely not even the slightest hint of kink shaming (Dan can’t offer that, I have seen it) and advice based on a pure and unforced interest in your well being, whether sexual or non.

And note: WE ACCEPT AND CHERISH ALL SEXUALITIES. All of them.

Even the ones that can get you in a lot of trouble.

So if you have a question you could never ask your friends, your family, your lover(s), or even Dan Savage, the solution is simply.

Ask your Mother instead.

And then the URL, of course.

And the thing is, an advice column is a super easy thing to set up. All you need is a place to receive the questions (AKA an email address) and a place to post the answers (AKA a simple blog. )

I can totally do that.

And this is something I truly believe in. I want to spead my loving arms wide and gather in all the people society has left out in the code because of what they are into. I want to shelter people from society’s senseless scorn and parasitic guilt. I want everyone – everyone – to feel safe in their sexuality and know that there is someone out there who loves and accepts and understands them and wants them to be happy.

And when I say everyone, I mean every human being on the planet. Yes, even those people, and those people, and those other people.

You know why?

Because desire is never wrong.

Acts can be wrong, but desires cannot. Whatever your lust demands is morally fine. It is never wrong to want something.

After all, people fantasize about all kinds of things that would be horrible crimes if they happened without consent.

Rape, torture, kidnapping, being buried alive, you name it. If these things happened outside of a consensual sexual play session, they would be appalling.

But if everyone involved has consented and is having a good time, then they are fine.

So yes. I will make myself into the mother figure for all the perverts, weirdos, misfits, drop-outs, losers, and other people who society judges as disposable.

I think I have just found my calling.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

WARNING : I have no idea where I am going with this. Let’s find out together.

I am, by nature, a creature of enthusiasm. I get big waves of inspiration (and other emotions) and my keenest desire is to follow them.

But I don’t. I hold back. The wave crashes over me, leaving me bruised and battered, and if anything, I end up praying there isn’t another one for a while.

Why? Because I am too scared to surf. I don’t know where that wave is going and so therefore I do not trust it, and refuse to get on board. Plus I am afraid of the power of the wave and tend to assume that could only end in me being dashed to pieces on the rocks of the shore, or by being swept out to sea and lost.

Back to water imagery! But liquid water this time.  That’s progress!

It all comes back to control again, and the underlying assumption that all things which are outside of control and/or cannot be predicted can only lead to disaster.

That’s how it works in my mind. It really feels like unpredictable is the same thing as bad. And my subjective experience reinforces this idea because I do not take surprises well. The unexpected can really fuck me up on an motional level. I have always hated surprises. They undo me.

So in that sense, the unpredictable (or rather, the unpredicted) really is a disaster, regardless of the actual nature of the event.

It could be a surprise party at which I will be feted and celebrated by everyone I love and all the people I admire and given tons of affection and acclimation and recognition ended with a check for ten million bucks, and there would still be a part of me that hates the surprise and is sitting there whining in my mind that it just wants to go home and relax and let my jangled nerves calm back down.

It’s just how I am built.

But back to enthusiasism. The biggest block by far to my catching my own waves is how badly I take disappointment.

Disappointment is basically surprise plus hope times sadness. If I am enthusiastic about doing something and then it turns out I can’t do it and won’t eve do it, I am devastated. The energy of the wave of enthusiasm does not go away easily. It drains slowly and bitterly away, leaving me feeling crushed.

Hence my reluctance to share anything I feel enthusiastic about with some people. There’s nothing wrong with these people, they are just not able to give me the sort of emotional response I am looking for when I share my enthusiasms.

So what I am looking for? Equal enthusiasm and excitement. I want them to be as happy about the whole thing as I am. And that’s a pretty tall order.

It’s one I probably couldn’t fulfill myself, either. Not well enough. Because coming from someone else, that wave of enthusiasm will be treated like a hostile force trying to rip me from my safe little world and be repulsed.

Somewhat. In general, I reflect people’s enthusiasm and do my level best to share it precisely because I don’t want to disappoint them.

But I only have a fixed amount of enthusiasm to share. In general, I can share someone’s enthusiasm as long as doing so does not place any demands of instant action and change of me,

It’s the difference between :

Them ; “I just saw Jay-Z and Beyonce!”
Me : “Oh my god, that’s amazing!”

and

Them ; “I just saw Jay-Z and Beyonce!”
Me : “Oh my god, that’s amazing!”
Them : “Now lets run out into the street and follow them!”
Me : “ummmm…. I don’t really…. ”
Them : “Suit yourself. AWAY! “

I want to be the sort of person who would jump on that opportunity and go with Them to see the officially Royal Couple of the world. I really do.

But I am not.

Luckily, I have plenty of other virtues to make up for the fact that I am not quick off the starting block nor am I good at handling the unexpected.

And disappointment wrecks me.

And I am building up my strength and resistance. I am tired of being an insubstantial wishy washy fearful shadow crouching in a corner hoping nobody notices him and he doesn’t have to deal with people.

I know what I want now. I want that great shining light of warmth and strength and robust health. When I saw the sun shinig through the glass I wanted to reach out and grab it and cram it against my heart in hopes of bringing it back to life.

Live, you magnificent bastard! LIVE!

Sadly, it is not that easy. Melting the ice around my heart and bringing spring to my wintry soul will be a lot more like long, slow sips of a bitter cleaning tea that will drive out all impurities and imperfections and bring me to my true self, shiny and magnificent.

But the process itself will be a rolling nightmare as those impurities object to being remove and front like they are legitimate feelings when they ain’t nothing but trash waiting for me to throw it out.

HARD.

It’s a time of breaking old patterns to make way for new, better, healthier ones that fit me better. A time to recognize that stability is not a primary virtue and there are worse things in the world than unpredictability, surprise, and being out of control.

If I was truly in control, I would have the life I want. Any other definition of being in control is outrageous bullshit that attempts to staple a halo onto what is an unreasoning fear based on some very out of date information.

I am not the sad person who hides from the world and whiles away his days with video games and Facebook and pretending to be a fox.

I am the strong, happy, amazing person who will emerge from the wreckage of that false version of myself.

The one that will step out of that broken shell and stride into the future while this shadow life of mine fades from my mind like a bad dream.

And I will never, ever look back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just realzied a feww minutes ago that I have fallen into a trap pof which I am far too familair : hating my life.

That’s npot good. Hating my life makes it harder, not easier, to do with things that might improve it. If I truly want to escape my icy prison, I have to accept things the way they are now and seek to build on that.

Not referring to my life as an icy prison would be a goof start.

It is always soseductuvely easy to think of your life in terms if everything you do not have. It’s like that is the default mode for humanity, or at least for white people. That’s why it doesn’t matter how successful someone is, they can still be just as miserable as when they started out.

They are taking everything they have for granted and thinking of their lives only in terms of that which they have failed to achieve or obtain. In a system like that, the game is impossible to win. Because there will always be something you don’t have.

And maybe that is the point, in a way. As offensive as it is to our basic ideas of merit and reward for someone very successful to be very unhappy, this “moving the goalposts” attitude provides maybe unusual benefits.

Like stability. You might be unhappy but at least you know nothing is ever going to force you to change inside like actually appreciating you success would.

It also provides purpose, structure, and direction.You don’t have to worry abotu what to do with yourself because you already know. You will be pursuing your definition of success. That is the true allure of this impostor syndrome lifestyle.

It might not produce happiness but it keeps you from having to face the great existential question, “So now what do I do?”.

That’s why the same person who told you at the bar last night how success is bullshit and hwo they feel they have wasted their life pusuing meaningless kudos and rewards  they don’t even care about will nevertheless go right back to climbing that corporate ladder the next day.

Because what else are they going to do?

Anyhow, back to the original point. Amazing how easy it is for me to wander off on a grand intellectual tangent rather than deal with the tough stuff.

My point, long ago in a galaxy far away, was that I will get nowhere until I accept my life as it is now in full instead of just seeing the negatives.

In order to do that, I will now go against the very pith and marrow of my temperament and list the good things about my life.

Switching polarities has to start somewhere. Here we go, the Good Things About My Life list, June 2018

1. I don’t have to work for a living. My needs are amply pprovided for by the Province of British Columbia. In cruler times, I might have ended up in the asylum or the poor house or the gutter. Life is very hard for males who can’t cope. SO it is good that society is iind enough to support my nonproductive ass.
2. I have fun video games to play. They keep my pleasantly entertained. I’ve loved video games all my life, and I now live in a magical era where high quality games are only a few clicks away. It’s a very rewarding hobby.
3. I’m hella smart and talented. If you hate it when I talk about the ways in which I am awesome, skip this item. I keep saying this because it is so easy for me to forget : I have gifts most people dream of having. I have a highly advanced mind which teems with creative ideas of surprising depth and complexity. And I am capable of taking those ideas and turning them into the written word in a way that has frequently been referred to as nifty. Most people can’t do that.
4. I have three awesome friends. And that’s all I need. Three people in my life with whom I am mentally sypatico and temperamentally aligned. We get along great and have alot of fun together. I am very lucky to know these people. Especially Joe and Julian, because having heard and experienced some Roomies From Hell stories, I am eternally grateful to live amongst sane persons.
5. I live in a top tier country.  I was lucky enough to be born into the modern world and therefore, despite the limits of my circumstances, I have lived a lifestyle of unimaginable luxury compared to the days of yore. Merely being on the internet gives me access to both riches beyond compare and a staggeringly diverse array of entertainments of all types. It’s an amazing time to be alive.
6. I am relatively healthy.  I suffer from no crippling physical illnesses. I am not confined to a wheelchair or a hospital bed. I don’t live in mortal fear of peanuts. I can get around when I want to.
7. I’m a heck of a nice guy. I am, in general, a pleasant and likeable fellow with a warm and witty personality. I can be extremely charismatic and charming, with an easy demeanour that puts people at ease.
8. I have all the time by myself that I could ever need.  And I need a lot. In my life as it exists now, I have all the time I need to recharge my introvert batteries so that I can once more face the world with all its stimuli.

And that’s all the ones I can think of right now. Phew, going against your negativity is hard work! I am so tired now.

Anyhow, the point is that I have everything I need. And if I decide I want to expand and improve my life, I have all that I need to do that too.

So no more self-reproach. My life ain’t that bad.

And the sooner I accept that, the sooner I can get down to making it even better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.