This could get tricky, as that phrase only coalesced out of the primodila madness of my mind a little while ago, and that means I haven’t had time to think about it much besides a routine check to make sure it feels true,.

Sometimes, that’s enough.

And it does feel true. The idea, when I summon it, has a nice solid feel to it when I tap it with my Nietzshean hammer, and I can feel its deep resonance echoing all of my mind.

That’s  how my mind works. Ideas are practically solid objects to me, with characteristics like solidity, size, weight, transparency, soundness, priority, and above all SMELL AND/OR TASTE.

Some ideas just plain smell bad.

Anyhow, to forcibly yank myself back to the point with the force of a parent who sees their toddler  ambling toward a busy road, what I think I mean (I could be wrong) by “letting life flow through me” is a change in fundamental attitude towards life where I no longer let my paranoia froce me to subject every little thing I experience to a brutal scrutinization before deciding if it gets let in or filtered out.

Fundamentally, this would mean surrendering the illusion of control. The ultimate purpose of all that scrutinty and verification is to give myself the feeling that I can control what happens to me and I can keep the bad things out that way.

A sound enough policy if a little something called sanity is at the controls but as well all know, in my, it ain’t.

What happens is that in order to achieve this goal of control,. I end up doing extremely little and letting in very little as well. And what I do let in comes safely via the internet, where its stimulation level is greatly reduced and I have total control.

This is no way to live. In fact, it barely qualifies as being alive.

There is a great big world out there full of potentially enriching experiences that would improve my life, including the kind that lead to a career, and yet here I sit, day in, day out, playing videos games to pass the time like I am waiting out a prison sentence.

But I’m a lifer. So what the fuck am I waiting for?

While traveling with my friends on Sunday, we briefly stoppedin an area full of green grassy fields that glowed under the joyous summer sunlight.

And I found myself looking at the grass and thinking “This is what I am missing. Life. Reality. The simple pleasures of nature. Being part of the world instead of apart from it.

Being truly alive instead of shambling about like a poorly thawed zombie.

Having strength and vitality and joy in my life, and all the little things that remind us that we are here and alive and real and it’s not all going to go away if we stop watching it.

My god, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? My connection to reality is so tenuous and febrile that I feel like it could all go away in an instant, like a TV turning off.

My total lack of trust and faith in the world is so prfound that I do not even trust that reality will still be there if I stop looking at it.

That explains these images related to staring I have floating in my mind. I have had this notion of staring a problem down in my mind for a very long time. As if just by paying extremely close attention to something. I can dominate it and make it submit to my will and my control.

Like I am imposing my version of reality over the problem.

And make no mistake, this is angry, aggressive staring. There is no warmth to my eyes in this image. I am glaring at the thing like I am just daring it totry to get away with something. Like I am some puritanical chaperone at a junior high dance.

And there is a terrifying blankness that is part of this image. Like I am telling the world “there is NOTHING THERE. There is NOTHING THERE. ”

That sounds remarkably like how I got over my fear of the dark and various other childhood bugbears. On the mental plane, I solved this problems by asserting reason with all my might and therefore mentally dominating the problem.

Wow, I gave my head a shake and all kinbds of fruitful stuff came flying out!

Back to letting life flow through me. The image is one of being part of the stream of humanity as opposed to being a rock in said stream, with everything in life passing around me but never moving me.

Obviously, this involves letting go.

It always comes back to letting go.

And that means surrendering control. It means letting life take you where it takes you and accepting that this means reacting in realtime to what is going on instead of having time to think about it and put into the right words.

That leads me to these other words that came to me earlier. Words that will be very hard for me to type in a way that makes them very important to type, and repeat, and keep on repeating till I believe it.

So here goes : there is nothing wrong with being out of control. 

There is nothing wrong with being out of control. 

There is nothing wrong with being out of control. 

There is NOTHING WRONG with being OUT OF CONTROL. 

Especially when the price of control is not having a life.

If I am ever to escape the icy prison I have constructed, I will have to learn let go, take thinga as they come, and relax the amount of control I expect to have over my life.

The right way to learn to deal with the world is to go out and do things and thus build up your sense that whatever happens, you will still be there when it is over.

That’s how healthy people live their ;lives and it works for them.

They let life flow through them.

And maybe that is all I really need.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been getting that “squashed flat between two microscope slides” feeling lately.

It’s part of my cycle. Right now, the urge to do something with my life is rising but the resistance to action has not been overcome yet, and so I go ka-squish between them.

It leaves me feeling nihilistic. I don’t give a fuck about anything. Nothing matters. Nothing means anything to me. The whole damned world can fuck off and die.

This phase exists as a reaction to the previous phase, where all the nattering niggling negative voices in my head have gotten so loud that I can’t think and the only way I can shut them up and get some peace and quiet is to smash the whole damned thing with the beautifully blunt and brutal force of my id.

Fuck all y’all. Get the fuck out of my house NOW. I don’t care HOW long you’ve been waiting in line. You’re all a bunch of assholes anyway and I couldn’t care less about your precious fucking feelings.

You’re lucky I am letting you leave here alive. I would put you up against the wall and kill you with a laser backed machine gun if I could.

But I’m not strong enough yet. So for now, you live.

But GTFO my head right now.

It might seem odd to some that one can find refuge and comfort in pure nihilism. For most of my life I have considered nihilism, pessimism, and cynicism to be moral failings found only in those who lack the courage to keep caring even when it’s very hard.

And I still believe that on the philosophical level. But I am beginning to understand the emotional appeal in a way I never would have had I not needed to go there in order to continue on my jagged journey to recovery.

In fact, I am beginning to be somewhat suspect of a lot of things;. It’s very easy to hold lofty ideals when it’s all intellectual to you anyhow and there are no strong human emotions from the id getting in the way.

It’s quite another when you reduce your detachment level and star to really feel things. Strong things. Deep things. Powerful things.

Things that, if you are lucky, are strong enough to make you DO things.

I’m working on it.

At least I have gotten to a point where I am en joying these new, stronger emotions. I have developed a taste for the heat and power of these emotions – they are such a welcome relief from the cold and weakness I usually feel.

I am hoping that if I keep connecting with these geothermal forces within me, the tundra of my heart will melt, spring will finally come, and what was once permafrost becomes rich and verdant soil just waiting to burst into riotous bloom.

And if it takes a volcanic eruption to make that happen, so be it!

Earth and fire imagery!

The trick is in somehow both learning to me more gentle with myself and learning not to be such a goddamned pussy at the same time.

I suppose I am hoping the two will meet in the middle somewhere.

It all cycles back to the fear I feel when I imagine taking the sort of positive action that would actually improve my life. It is the bane of my existence, my bete noir, the magnetic force field that holds me in place.

And I have recently realized that it is not just fear. There is a great sadness to it as well. Like when I ask myself if I want to do something, all I can do is shake my head then turn my tear streaked face to the wall.

I want to reach out to that scared, sad little and share my new found connection to all that is warm and good with him and tell him that everything will be okay now, he’s been found and he’s been heard and he will never, ever be abandoned again.

That no mattger where I go in my cosmic travels, I will take him with me. And that I will always have time, attention, energy, patience, love, comfort, and above all caring for him. That he will always be important to me and that that he is a wonderful young man who is good and healthy and pure and nothing anway can ever do (or has done) can change that because he will always be my amazing and wonderful lil guy.

Mama’s here now, junior. And everything is going to be okay.

It’s crazy how long it has taken me to realize that all the warmth and love I have craved for my entire life was right there in my frozen id the whole time. I suppose it’s somewhat counterintuive to my previous mindset.

As a good liberal intellectual type, I internalized the idea that the strong primal reptile-brain type emotions like rage were Bad and that nothing in the world could be worse than getting caught behaving purely out of emotion.

That;s what the other guys do. They act out of primitive emotions instead of exercising restraint and using their heads for once.

So if that’s bad, the opposite of it must be good…. right/

Nope. The truth is always somewhere in between. Turn out that those emotions are vitally necessary to human happiness. They provide the heat and lights for the building that is our lives. You can try to survive on the cold light of reason alone, but odds are you will be miserable and until you open up your heart to embrace real emotion and open up your mind to a new way of being, you will not even be able to see the problem and will go on blaming the world for not giving you what you will not give yourself.

We can be emotionally self-sufficient creatures, if we let ourselves be. With fqaith and imagine, we can generate within ourselves everything we could ever need.

And all the have to do is open the door to it.

Well consider all my doors so open that they are hanging of their hinges.

Let’s see what happens next!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here goes. Time to trigger my emotional gag reflex and bring up some old pain.

First off, here’s where we left off yesterday :

1. Contipated after surgery, I suffered for two whole days before the nurses managed to browbeat the meek retarded orderly into very inexpertly giving me my enema
2. Evil nurse made me get up and walk to the other end of the corridor and take a normal, stand up shower despite my fresh stitches and barely being able to stand and with no help from her or the orderlies to get there, rather than give me a sponge bath like they would for patients they considered human
3. I found out by eavesdropping on some orderlies that I got the surgeon who was the joke of the hospital because he was such a fuckup. That explains why I ended up beuing gutted like a fish with a huge scar from my navel to between my nipples and had to spend eight or nine days in the hospital after a routine surgery that would normally require two at most
4. I got mocked openly by a pair of orderlies around 16 hours after surgery.I was too weak and too in pain to even lift my head off the pillow at the time.  Worse, they talked about me like I wasn’t even there. That made fun of my weight.

Great news! It gets worse.

Medications.  I never got mine.

Imagine that. There I was, recovering from surprisingly major surgery,  with all my medications listed on my chart,. IN A FREAKING HOSPITAL. And yet I never got any of my medications. Not my diabetes meds – and that could have killed me. And not my depression and/or anxiety ones either, which might have made me kill myself.

Imagine the state of mind it takes to simply ignore what it says on the chart because the patient is scary and gross and very low status and unable to advocate for themselves and you can totally get away with not bothering.

It was so bad that when I finally told a nurse or nurse-like creature that I needed my diabetes meds, she querelously said “You’re not diabetic!”.

I had to patiently argue her into actually looking at my chart then, after she said “I don’t see that here!”, I had to point at the place where it said I was diabetic, and then allI got from her was her saying “Oh. ” and diappearing.

Pain management.  I didn’t get that either.

Yup. You read that right. I had to recover from being split open by the guy who graduated last in his class completely without pain medication.

I was supposed to be on what was an experimental program at that point where I could push a button on this gizmo and get pain meds via IV every so often.

This experiment was being run by a young woman who was a med student.

She was, of course, terrified of me.

And she had no idea how to administer a butterfly IV. This future doctor pretty much just picked a spot at random and stuck it in, all the while twittering neurotically about how she was “not a nurse” and “a nurse should be doing this” and how she “had no idea what she was doing”.

So why not get a nurse to do it? you might ask.

Because she was too timid to ask. I assume my health and welfare was not sufficient motivation for her.

After all, she wasn’t a nurse!

And the damned thing kept slipping out if I so much as moved a muscle on that hand. so I got to get randomly poked over and over again. In between, more and more medical tape was applied to the problem area in order to hold the damned thing in place until my whole hand looked like it had been gift-wrapped by a toddler.

So I lay there, incredibly depressed and in great pain and with blood sugar doing god knows what, and all because the nurses were scared of me.

You might ask yourself, what kind of person could treat another human being that way?

The answer is simple : the kind who does not see you as a human being.

Oh, and did I mention that I went through all this completely alone?

Visitors. I didn’t get those either.

Well, I got one. A furry named Peace. Someone I considered a friend. He visited me one time for maybe fifteen minutes and he had to bring his father with him to do even that. And the whole time, he was clearly freaking out.

Guess he couldn’t stand to be around me either.

Other than that, nobody. Not a single person. I had lots of friends in the local furry community (that I founded and ran) at the time but none of them came to see me.

But that is always how it is been with me. People are always eager to help me… as long as it costs them absolutely nothing. Not their time, or their effort, or their own money, or even the tiniest of inconveniences or deviations from their usual routines.

In other words, people like to think of themselves as the kind of person who would help a person like me but are perfectly happy doing absolutely nothing to prove it.

Because they would totally help me! If it’s wasn’t for the fact that literally everything else in the world is more important than me.

My only comfort in this is the sure and certain knowledge that when I land in the hospital again, it will NOT got the same way. I am far more self-confident now and my experiences with hospitals since then have made me keenly aware of how people will treat me like dirt there if I let them – maybe tomorrow, I will talk about my experiences with Richmond Hospital’s Adult Outpatients Program – so I would go in prepared to fight for my right to be treated like any other patient.

Almost like I was human!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Especially women. Oh god, the women.

Those of you who know me in the real world know what I look like, but for those who do not, take a gander at this :

I’m this thoughtful looking fellow.

Just another sweapants wearing beardy fat dude, really.

I am also this guy :

What a wild and crazy guy!

Aren’t I adorable?

But what I want you to focus on is that I am a very large man. I am 6’1′ tall and I weigh over 340 pounds. That is a very large quantity of person.

If, ya know, you go by volume.

And most people do. A hell of a lot of assumptions are made about you when you are a large male, and like a lot of hurtful assumptions, they basically boil down to “you must be exactly how you make me feel”.

So people – especially women – are frightened by me and therefore assume I must be scary, aggressive, strong, poiwerful, and very male.

Ergo, the expectations of gender performance for me at set very high. Even if I was just a perfectly normal, healthy, mild-minnered man, I would attract a certqain amount of contempt because I do not match how I look in their eyes.

But I am not normal or healthy. I am weaks and ill and somewhat meek. I fail damned near every male gender performance check and worse, I fail them when my appearance sets the bar so high.

So people – especially women – view me with contempt. Were I am small, slender fellow, I would stimulate nurturing responses and that would counter the contempt.

But I look like I am powerful and strong, and therefore failure toi do so means I am worthy of nothing but scorn and disgust.

Isn’t it funny how if you fail to perform your gender role right and the viewer perceives themselves to be socially superior to you, they blame YOU for not not matching their expectations, and not their expectations themselves?

After all, if someone is socially inferior to you, however they make you feel has to be their fault because otherwise you would have to take the blame when there is a socially inferior person to take it for you.

And that would suggest a social inferior could be right, and therefore in that small way actually superior to you, and that’s just plain crazy talk.

Anyhow, back to gender performance and my lack thereof.

One might think that my homosexuality might enter into the equation, and it does – but probably not how you think.

After all, I don’t “look” gay, whatever that means.

And in a previous era, the moment where people figured out I was gay would have resulted in an even lower gender performance score and quite possibly a downright dangerous level of contempt.

But in these enlightened time, it would actually work in my favour. Gay men are a protected category now, with different expectations of gender performance, and so my being gay would protects me from my lack of gender performance to some extent.

But that only works if they know.

Barring that, people – women especially – view me with contempt, as if I have failed them somehow and it sickens them just to be around me.

I have gotten the eyeroll and disgusted sigh of contempted from nurses, doctors, social workers, teachers, school administrators, other people’s parents, receptionists, telephone surveryors, and even random people on the street.

Can you imagine how soul destroying that is? And most of the time, it’s been women.

And most of the time when it’s been men, it’s been gay men.

Quo est demonstratum. If someone is in the pool of people who is attracted to  your gender, they will judge you quite ruthlessly as to your gender merit.

And that’s fine if it’s just a determination as to whether or not you are attracted to someone. I have my type(s). You have yours. No big whoop.

But it never stops there. People use the same metric to decide your worth as a human being, as if everyone on Earth was only there for your sexual stimulation.

Makes a lot of Trump-type sexism make more sense, doesn’t it?

I have experience direct pain, suffering, and medical harm because of this contempt. When I was in the ROyal Columbian Hospital in New West because my gall bladder went kaboom. my surgery went to the worst surgeon on duty, the nurses found me so gross they would barely enter the room, and the orderlies laughed at me openly when I was far too sick to fight back.

The result was that I suffered a hell of a lot more than I should have. For example, when I was recovering from surgery, I was extremely constipated.

This is not unusual. After all, the anesthetics shut down everything, and sometimes things do not start back up again right away.

Same thing happened with my bladder, too.

In both cases, the remedy is obvious and well known. Enema for the constipation, catheter to the bladder to get that flowing again.

I did not get either for two whole days.

And this, despite telling everyone who came into the room about it. The first nurse I told about it basically went “eep” and disappeared, never to be seen again. After that, nurses would only open the door a crack and peek into my room, presumably to gawk at me like I was a  circus freak.

If I looked in their direction, the door snapped shut like a mnousetrap.

And when I finally got the enema that would ease my pain, it was delivered not by a qualified nurse but by the meekest of the orderlies who clearly extremely did not want to do it and who basiucally did it without looking.

Then there was the supposed nurse who insisted I get out of bed and go get a shower with absolutely no help from her or anyone else because I smelled bad.

Of course I smelled bad. I was very sick. The normal procedure in that case is to give the patient a sponge bath in bed.

But that would have involved touching me, so clearly that wasn’t going to happen.

In fairness, though, there was one nurse – my angel – who had the purity of soul to remember that I was still a human being – or at least a sympathetic animal – whose suffering actually mattered and therefore took care of me when she could.

I wish I knew her name. To me, she is a saint. She is the one who gave me my urinary catheter, she was the one who adjusted my bed when I couldn’t do it myself, and she was the one who actually deigned to tell me when I was being released.

But she was the exeption. For the most part I was treated like low-grade shit.

And why? Because the nurses were scared of and disgusted by me. And that was based entirely on my appearance.

Hmmm. I should write out that whle story sometime soon. It’s quite horrible.

But it would do me a lot of good to get it out of my system.

Maybe I need a nurse to give me an enerma of the soul.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Do to a surprise change in plans, I am blogging two hours early, which in my world is way, way earlier than planned.

Small lives run on small details, after all.

Now patient readers know how I feel about sudden change. I hate it. I need predictability in my life. Sudden changes throw me off kilter and I am not at all skilled in abandoning one plan and switchibng to another with any degree of grace or aplomb.

But this is not actually an objection to the change in plans. In whole, it is a good thing, because it means I get to spend more time hanging out with my friends on a lovely sunny day in June.

Kinda makes me want to go to the beach. But my friends are not beach people, and going alone would be a big challenge to my social anxiety.

Especially if it’s crowded. I can’t do crowded.

Anyhow, the change of plans upsets me but I am not objecting. My difficulty in adjusting to changes that happen at a less thna glacial speed is my own business and I will deal with it and be there for and with my friends.

And I am pretty sure that’s a good thing.

I certainly prioritize my relationships over my own psychological bullshit. Part of how I live with myself in the shape I am in is by assuring myself that I can pull myself together and do what needs to be done when it matters.

To me, it is vitally important that those I love and cherish know that I value them and consider them important to my life. Important enough, in fact, for me to make personal sacrifices in order to be with them.

That’s now what life handed me. I got treated like I was wrong just for being alive, let alone having needs and desires of my own.

I’m basically the puppy who was bought as a gift but quickly wore out his welcome once he stopped being cute and nobody wanted to put in the work of caring for him so everyone started just ignoring him as much as possible and only with great reluctance receives the bare minimum of care required to keep him alive, and even that comes with a great big dose of resentment.

The puppy understands none of this, of course. It only knows that at first people were nice to it then it did something and they stopped loving him and so now he desperately tries to be as cute and appealing as he can in hopes of getting that love back.

But people don’t back down from resentment. In their minds. the puppy (now a dog) is a pest and a nuisance and an unwanted and unwelcome burden, and in their heart of hearts they wish the dog would just die or go away so they wouldn’t have to deal with it any more and things could go back to the way they were.

So the dog wags his tail super hard any time so much as looks his way, and learns to blend in with the furniture and stay out of everyone’s way as much as possible so that they don’t get mad at him when he reminds them that they still have him.

That’s pretty much what my childhood was like at home. It’s sort of what it was like at school, too, but even I know better than to try to stretch the metaphor that far.

Something about obedience school? Meh. Not worth it.

Because that was my childhood, it is very important to me to give others what I did not get myself. I try my best to let people know I cherish and value them.

And the desire to do so hits me in these sudden. desperate waves because I am such a lonely little satellite and I never know when I will come within communications range of one of the people in my life so if I want to get my vitally important emotional information transmitted to them, I have to do it immediately or I will lose my chance.

And losing my chance to tell people I love them would crush me.

It’s not an unfounded worry, either. I can be very remote and disconnected. I would not blame someone if they thought I didn’t give a damn about them because I had drifted so far away from them and seemed to be in no hurry to get back.

In fact, I imagine some people think I have forgotten them entirely. and that must be hard on them as I am such a warm, bright light when I am focusing on them.

But then I wander off and people might well be like “So WTF was that?”.

All I can say is that I do not do this kind of thing on purpose. I mentally wander whether I want to or not. It takes reinforcement to keep me in one place and if I am not getting that from someone, I will wander off in search of it.

That may seem heartless to some. It’s hard to argue that it is not at least somewhat mercenary of me.

But it’s not like I have no loyalty. I will patiently wait for someone if I feel like I can trust them to get back to me in a timely fashion.

But sooner or later, the darkness will come back for me, and I will have to seek out a new source of the heat and light I so desperately lack that I need to get it from an outside source or I will simply fade away.

My real crime is that I lack the ability to ask for attention when I am feeling neglected. I just drift away instead. That’s a weakness of mine and I am not proud of it.

But it’s how I am nevertheless. I will be very happy to see the person I was waiting for when they finally show up. but they should not be surprised if I have cozied up with someone else in the meantime.

It’s just how I am built.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

During therapy today, I realized that my prime problem is that there is this magnetic force keeping me stuck in the center of my existence and until I learn to overcome that, nothing else is going to happen.

And we will discuss this. But first, the song.

Don’t worry, it’s not the Reservoir Dogs version!

Hmmm. So that’s what the dude looks like. I expected him to look more like Tom Petty.

Heck, for a long time I thought that actually was a Tom Petty song.

We miss you, Tom!

Anyhow, back to being stuck in the middle alone. I have talked about the “inward tide” before, and “trying to escape my own gravity well” ^[1] but I have never seen the situation as clearly as when I realized I was stuck in the middle of a big scary universe  by all the fears I have and all the aspects of life that I avoid because they make me sad and make me hate myself.

Call it the “infinite retreat”. I am silmultaneously avoiding so many things that it would take three entire alphabets plus ancient Phoneician cunieform to plot my trajectory. The only possibly outcome of such a configuration is stasis.

I am rooted to the spot because there is no direction which does not take me closer to something which I am avoiding. So I remain in the middle of all my fears and the days pass while I fuck around playing video games and wishing I had the ability to move on with my life and make a whole person of myself.

I have suppressed so much of myself for so long. Practically all of my anger, certainly all of my personal anger. My lust – or at least, the part of it that cannot be satisified by porn. All the sadness from all the pain I have suffered, as well as the pain itself.

This wholesale suppression of entire major emotions explains why I have always felt incomplete and two dimensional and not quite real. I instinctively understood that other people had so much more to them than I did. They were vital and healthy and whole. I was limp, sickly, . and fragmented.

And for my whole life, I have wanted what they had. I craved their warmth and strength and vitality. I have been very cold for a very long time and long to come in from the cold and warm up by the fire and become human again.

But it took so long for me to even realized that I was so cold because of all the emotions I suppressed. Suppression is good at hiding itself like that.

After all, suppression wouldn’t work if you were aware of it.

So now I am desperately trying to revive myself. Where’s my Saint Bernard and his cute keg of brandy? I have been hypothermic for a very long time and it is going to take a long time for me to warm back up.

It would help if I could leave my messed up middle and walk in the sun.

But the fear is so damned strong.

And it’s more than fear that powers my personal black hole. There is no gravity without mass, after all, and in my case, the mass is provided by all the suppressed emotions and memories I keep with me at my core.

So if I want to escape my gravity well, it will take far more than simply thrusting harder.

It will take actually ejecting mass to reduce the pull of gravity.

And that’s a hell of a lot harder.

Back from Paragon meeting.

Let’s talk about the paradox of avoidance.

I haven’t done much work on Paragon materials. That makes me feel very guilty. Because I feel very guilty about it, when I think about Paragon, I feel said guilt, and to escape the guilt I push the subject from my mind. That makes it impossible to do any kind of work on the project. And that makes me feel guilty.

Loop ad infinitum. or at least till the day I die.

And I have tons of things like this in my life, lurking in my mind like standing waves of maladaptation. What links them all is avoidance.

Avoidance, in this case, is the tendency to flee from things rather than sticking around and dealing with them. It can be bad enough when it is a single thing that you could resolve if you just faced it and handled it.

But when avoidant reactions form easily and attach strongly, like in my case, the problem goes fractal almost immediately, and I get avoidant reactions nestes within other avoidant reacts and so on and so on until I am the center pixel in a kaleidoscopic display of limitless depth and complexity.

In other words. I’m all fucked up in the head.

And it bothers me, because I find the sort of weakness involved – the inability to get over myself and solve the frigging problem instead of fleeing – to be particularly distasteful in myself. I think of myself as a tough sort of person who faces the facts and gets things done, but the truth is, there are a lot of things in which I am a fragile and delicate butterfly who wilts under the slightest of strains.

That’s not acceptable. I won’t have it.

The solution is obvious – face the problems and solve them already – but right now I do not have the strength. And there’s only one place I can get that strength.

My id. Of course.

I keep imagining taking something like an id vacation. Takje time off from being smart and clever and wise and try letting my gut and my dick make the decisions for a while. See what happens when I turn my hypermind off for a while and get in touch with all the things underneath it that I have been neglecting for so long.

Kind of hard to picture how that would actually happen. Maybe an extended stay at some decently decorated steam baths. Or a cruise for bears where I could cruise for bears and get cruised by bears.

So step one is getting sex, is what I am saying.

The other stuff if harder to imagine. It’s not like there’s a place that specializes in helping you vent your anger or your sadness. Beside “the Internet”, ha ha.

But something somewhere has to give.

I just hope I survive the resulting explosion.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And so has yours. Trust me on this. Because if they can get to me….

I’m a very canny and suspicious kind of guy. I have been keenly aware of all the bullshit ways corporations try to hack your mind and bend you to their will.

I mean, when you think about it, that is whatl advertising is all about. People get paid a lot of money to come up with ways to reprogram your mind into buying the product. It’s really an arms race between their applied psychology and your sales resistance, and the srtakes are high because your entire mental integrity is on the line.

It gets away with this because our culture ibnsists that we are all autonomous invidividuals in full control of our lives and our minds, and free to make – and be responsible for – whatever choice we want, without outside influence.

Ergo, while advertising clearly works – businesses wouldn’t spend so much on it if it didn’t – you will never find anyone to admit it works on them.

It’s always other people it works on. It is damned near social suicide to admit that you have been influenced by anything other than your own mind on anything in modern democratic cosumerist culture.

It’s akin to admitting you have been raped in that it means admitting to having been violated in a deep and terible way and not only do you run a high risk of people blaming the victim – like it only happened because you are weak mninded, unlike ME – but, quite wrongly and unfairly, it will make people look at you differently.

Like you have a contagious form of stupidity and they have to quaranatine themselves away from you lest you make them stupid too.

And like with rape, this denial of the possibilitity of it happening to YOU (and the obviou corollary that whoever it does happen to has something wrong with THEM) alklows the perpretators of the act to do it with impunity.

This runs so deep that most people are not even aware of the struggle. It takes a certain kind of ferocious (and possibly insane) metaconsciousness to be able to see the fishhook lurking in that tasty worm and refusing to bite it.

Most people either can’t see the hook because they lack metacognitive skill or they do not want to see it because that would make their world seem far more dangerous and ievil than they want to admit.

That’s why it takes freaks like me who never shy away from the darkness to look out for that kind of thing and do our best to warn the rest of the fish.

It’s an uphill swim.

Well this is one mental mutant who is not afraid to admit they have been manipulated by big business and that it happened so easily and so smoothly that it has been happening for over a decade and I just figured it out today.

What can I say,  it took them a while, but they finally figured out how to crack my code.

And they did it with math, the bastards. What I am talking about is the phenomenon I will call “multiple pricing” and it’s that thing that everyone that sells consumer level goods, like drug stores, supermarkets, and convenience stores. started to do about a decade ago and have kept doing it because clearly it works.

It’s quite simple. Instead of having a single price for a single product, they have a “sale” on two or more of them.

So instead of it being $4 for one, it’s $7 for two.

My mind instantly calculates that $7 for two means they are $3.50 each and $3.50 is less than $4 and that therefore buying two is a better deal.

And at that point, I am now completely unable to buy only one because that would be paying too much for it.  The price has been set at $3.50 and to pay $4 for one when I could pay $3.50 for two would be total madness. Just throwing the money away.

Even if I only really wanted one. Even if it could be scientifically proven than I wouild have gladly paid the $4 for it if I had never seen the 2 for 1 price. My sense of value is very finely tuned and they have figured out a way to recalibrate it.

Now, the mathier folk reading this might well be saying “But if you buy twice as much, you will buy it half as often, so what does the supermarket get out the deal?”

Great question, mathlete! I won’t get into the abstruse and mystical realm of retail sales too deeply,. but basically, if you are a supermarket or such, one of the most important numbers in your life is sales volume.

That’s the total amount of product you move. And if you move enough product, the corporations who make the stuff give you a break on the price as a way of encouraging their best sellers.

Enter multiple pricing. By getting consumers to buy more at the same time, the supermarket boosts its total apparent sales volume even if it is not actually selling more product, just selling more at a time.

I mean, sure, from a consumer’s point of view, it’s quite obvious that buying twice as much means buying half as often, but accountant don’t deal in reality, they deal in numbers, and if it makes the number go up, it gets rewarded.

And there is always the chance that having more of something actually will make you use more of it because it triggers a sense of “plenty” in the mind and we use resources more freely when we have “plenty”.

This is a good instinct that comes from a time before refrigeration, where the only way to store food was by getting fat during the times of plenty, like summer,.  and living off that fat in the times of famine, like winter.

Hence : “Oh, go ahead, take all you want, I got a great big bag of it from Costco”.

So yes, even the mighty fortress of my mind is vulnerable to these manipulations.

But of course, that would never happen to YOU, would it?

Guess that makes you better than me. Right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Which, in my case, is the feeling that all my deficits are at least canceled out by my enormous talents to the point where it averages out to an average person.

most people’s character sheets are evenly balanced and the character points are spent all across the board, with a few specializations so they have a career path.

Me, I spent it all on what I will (very) broadly as intellectual skills, and to get those I had to take some pretty major disadvantages,. and so far it’s been a raw deal.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all I do is play video games all day.

Speaking of which, I am close to the end of the one I have been playing,. Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s an old-style RPG type game of the sort that SSI used to put out, like Eye of the Beholder, which was a real beauty of a game, and Pool of Radiance, about which I do not have a pun.

I had trouble adjusting to the game at first because in that era of RPG, the standard model is based around a main character and his party of NPC companions fighting evil.

And that would be fine by me if it were turn based, like other games in the genre. But with Caldur’s Gate 2, they decided it would be more exciting to have things happen in realtime, otherwise known as ALL AT ONCE.

And I cannot do that shit. When too much is happening at once, my brain shuts down. I can’t track that many variables at the same time.

It’s the main reason I can’t play what are known as Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Or rather, I can play them, but only as far as my abilities to plan, manage resources, and design defence will take me.

If I have to command my troops in realtime battle. my brain goes TILT and I have an anxiety attack of sorts.

And I play video games to escape that shit.

Anxiety is the reason I don’t play anything Massively Multiplayer either. The sad truth is that even being around real people’s virtual avatars sets off my social anxiety and I start feeling like everyone knows how bad I suck at the game and views me with contempt.

How fucked up is that? Three. Three FUU (Fucked Up Unites).

I can see how some people solve a problem like that by externalizing it and blaming the people themselves or humanity in general for making them feel so bad.

That’s more or less how crankiness and misanthropy work. There are many ways to turn fear into anger and thus vent it. and misanthropy is one of the simplest because it doesn’t bother to identify any partitcular group of people as the cause of your pain.

I mean, if all people make you feel scared, inadequate, small, sad, and lonely, well then it must be all people’s fault, right?

It just makes sense!

That’s the sort of “all my emotions are justified and correct” thinking that I go on about now and then. These people make me feel bad, therefore they are bad.

Things are always exactly as they feel, essentially.

To realize that this is not always true requires a basic level of metaconsciousness. You have to be able to imagine a feeling not representing reality and both grasp and accept that your emotions and perceptions can give you false information.

If you can’t do that, then you have no conscious access to the highest of the higher brain functions. In many people, this causes them to fear and mistrust those brain functions because they blame those functions for evil things like doubt and uncertainty and having to think hard about things instead of just “going with your gut”.

But you don’t have to be a Dubya type to fall prey to this. We all do. One very old definition of neurosis is “emotional delusions” – like my feeling like everyone is judging me and hates me and wishes I would just die already.

I am lucky enough to have the level of metaconciousness to realize that these feelings do not represent reality at all. Most people who know me like me, and I have very few enemies in the world.

That doesn’t make the feelings go away, but it does keep me from being way, way crazier than I would be without it.

Like, random acts of violence crazy.

And yet, there are times when I wish I was that crazy. Kind of. What I am really thinking of is how nice it would be to stop having to exercise such a massive amount of restraint and discenment. I have to constantly fight those crazy feelings just to live the sort of sad existence I live and it is very, very tiring.

But I am never truly tempted to let go and go crazy because I know that if I did so, I would lose all sense of myself and who I am, and I have so little sense of that to begin with that I would never risk it.

Plus, I like, don’t want to end up in jail for something that humiliates my family and brings shame to all who know me.

But mostly it’s the sense of self thing.

I am trying to bridge the distance between the two extremes, total restraint versus total anarchy. It’s hard because the system is under so much pressure that it feels like I have to ,make the adjustments very slowly and carefully or the whole thing will explode.

That’s probably not true and it’s probably only my fearful and controlling “never stop on the road unless you know where it goes” nature that makes me so cautious.

I have only recently even conceptualized that it is possible to have faith in a process or even just a direction instead of relying on computable outcomes.

Translated, that means it is okay to follow that road simply because it might take you where you want to go and it at least is going in the right direction.

It always comes down to faith in the end, doesn’t it?

I need to get me some of that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Squiting due to the sun shining in my eyes at least, the most sacred hours of the day, my bloggening time.

How inconsiderate of it! It really should have asked for my permission. But that’s typical. isn’t? All you ask for is a littke consideration on the part of a massive ba;; of hydrogen being squeezed together so hard by gravity that it forms helium and what to you get?

Nothing, that’s what. Why do things things always happen to ME?

But I am a creature of habit, so waiting until later to blog is not really an option. I have very little structure in my life and so I tend to cling to whatever structure I have.

A totally structureless life is hell. Trust me, I have tried it. Just doing whatever whenever I feel like it. And the result was not pretty.

At least, it’s kind of fun. For me, acting on emkotion uis somewhat of a novelty, and there is always a certain releif in relaxing structure and letting things fall apart.

I remember laughing as my life lost all coherence. Bye bye. Go ahead and die. I do not give a single fuck. Don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya!

That what self-destuctive euphoria is like for me. It’s the thrill that makes it a constant temptation. There is a dark joy in letting it all go and letting turn you into nothing but protoplasmic goo once again.

It’s like rock bottom. Water always seeks the lowest level it can find, after all, and so there is a sense of safety in being as low as you can go.

After all, the falling is over now. You’re at the bottom of the well. And that mean loud cruel world you can;t handle is far away at the top.

That’s a pretty evocative metaphor for depression and its deadly allure.

Good for me!

Now where was I. Structure, right.

Of course, the comfort os structurelessness is a big fat lie. Sure, it’s a relief in the short term to now have to put any energy into maintaining my shape.

But after the relief wears off, I realize my tenuous interface with reality is gone and everything seems so hard and scary because I am now a men without a skeleton, and it takes a lot of effort to do even the simplests of transformations.

Turns out that even a liquid shapeshifter who is terrified of being in the wrong shape at the wrong time and so stays as liquid as possible at all times needs some degree of permanent structure in order to survive.

It’s always our coping mechanisms that ultimately hang us, isn’t it? The maladaptations. Things that solved the immediate problem but caused far greater issues down the road.

So when I manage to put some structure into my life – the kind that lasts past my next transformation – I hang on to it for dear life.

Because I know what the structureless void is like and I never, ever want to end up back there again, ever.

That points at the fundamental problem : my inability to generate my own structure. That’s what made going back to school so enticing. School provides plenty of structure for me – call that an artificial skeleton for shapeless goo people like myself.

And all you have to do is get it started, and riding that energy to the end.

What amazing savings!

Real life is much, much harder. There’s a million open doors and far too little information to make a choice as to which one to go through.

And the thing is. I know I need to derive my structure externally. A stronger goo person would be able to use that information to go look for a good source of structure.

But I’m too scared.

Scared of falling apart when I leave my current comfortable crevice and ending up soaking into the ground so deeply that my substance is too thin to maintain me and I am gone unto oblivion forever.

Scared of all that scary stimulation out there that leaves me stressed and confused and ultimate utterly lost. That’s another way of losing who I am as my brilliant intellectual self leaves the scene and leaves me as if I was a wild animal that had stumbled into human lands and has no idea where they are or what all these lights and objects mean, and none of its instincts are working to make things any better.

What I need in this metaphor is some kind human with a tranq gun to sedate me and release me back into the wild, where things will make sense again.

I feel panicked and confused and like screaming just from typing that.

What an odd thing it is that our minds can sabotage themselves so easily.

Scared of making a choice, in case it’s the wrong one. I am making progress on that one. After all, what’s so bad about making a wrong choice? Sure, it might hurt, but that will pass quickjly and I can just shrug and try something else.

And yet, as of the writing of these words. I remain paralyzed in the headlights of life, too scared to make any kind of choice and pursue it.

When I try to choose, all I can think of is all those doors slamming shut and my being trapped by whatever choice I made and in whatever form I took to choose it.

And with all those doors, what are the odds that I made the right choice? The thought of all the other possibilities dying scares the shit out of me and gives me a profound sense of loss, almost like grief.

As though the possibilities are people dependent on me and by choosing I am killing all but one of them because they were not good enough.

And at that point, I want nothing more than to bolt back to where I was and bury myself in the deepest hole I can find and never, ever try that again.

So here I rot.

What is missing is a sense of the possibilities I am gaining.

I guess those possibilities are strangers, and the old ones are my friends because they have been around for so long.

It’s true. To be a writer, you really must murder your darlings.

It’s just that I never knew there would be so many.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I n my mind, that is.

I’ve talked a couple of times in this space about my idea that some of the most brilliant people are those which, due to some kind of trauma, there is a huge void within them.

This void is emotionally terrible, but can also be put to use as a kind of massive workshop type space where large ideas can be handled, manipulated, examined from various angles, and if you are lucky, even constructed.

That allows for a breadth of mind that, in turn. enables a larger and more detailed vision of the world and of imagination.

That’s how it is with me,. I think. I have learned to use this vast vacuum inside my mind caused by the depression to enable me to see further than others. To see more of the chess board than others and therefore able to see more moves ahead than others.

This is strictly metaphorical chess, though. I don’t have the head for the real thing.

Hey, that reminded me of what I had planned to talk about today!

Okay, pretend we’re starting over.

The human calculator

Okay, now let’s talk about what it means when we describe someone as “calculating”. It seems like a simple and intuitive concept but when you give it a poke it soon reveals itself to be quite a dense and complex idea with a lot of assumptions packed into it.

You can tell this because there is such a large gap between its literal meaning and its contexctual meaning. Taken quite literally, it just means it’s someone who thinks logically about what they do – in other words, they calculate it.

And isn’t that what we all do? In some form?

But of course, its contextual meaning when applied to people is quite different. In that context, it implies that the person is cold and ruthless and lacks some basic human emotion and is therefore always viewing everything it terms of advancing their own interests instead of….

Instead of what? That’s where things get really interesting because it’s where cultural analysis starts tripping over its own feet as it tries to define the undefined.

Because what else is there to do but think about things? Feel about them, that’s what. So clearly the missing element in a person we describe as “calculating” is emotional.

And that implies that we expect there to be something besides cold calculation going on in people’s reactions and decision-making and that if it is not there, the person is immoral or even monstrous.

Let’s call this missing emotion “empathy” for the purposes of this discussion. The missing ingredient probably includes more than that, but it’s mostly empathy.

This empathy is clearly supposed to inform our decision making and, at least some of the time, lead us to do things other than what a purely logical, methodical, step by step thought process would produce.

The assumption seems to be that said purely logical thought process would lack human consideration and be entirely selfish.

And that’s where I come in, because I challenge that assumption.

For me, life really is that metaphorical chess game. I make whatever move my calculating mind tells me would produce the best result. ^[1] By doing so, I advance my agenda and improve my position.

And I honestly can’t imagine being any other way.

But nobody who knows me would describe me as calculating , nor would they say I lacked warmth. And I am far from selfish. Nor am I insensitive. ^[2]

I am, in fact, one heck of a nice guy. I sincerely want everybody to be happy and I genuinely enjoy making them happy. I really feel for people And that feeling does not operate outside of my calculating mind.

It is, in fact, integral to the whole operation.

Because no matter how ruthlessly efficient a computer is, it still only does what its operator tells it to do. And I have set mine to constantly calculate what will produce the greatest good in the world, with a balance struck between my own interests and those of everyone else.

In other words, my calculation includes my morality. The calculation is simply my way of figuring things out. Of arriving at the best solution for the problem at hand. And because I take this optimizing approach to life, and because morality is extremely important to the very core of who I am, I am compelled to always do the most moral thing I can.

Suboptimal morality is unacceptable to me.

In that sense, I am a bit like the robot nanny in the Bradbury story “I Sing The Body Electric”. She is most definitely a robot and had a computer for a brain. That means she was quite literally calculatuing in all her decisions. EVerything she did and said was the result of purely logical thought processes.

But all that logical calculation was in the service of her being the best possible nanny she could be for the story’s children. That meants being sweet, kind, considerate, wise, comforting, patient, and one heck of a cookie maker.

In other words, her calculation made her a nearly flawless  representation of everything we think of when we think of compassion.

And that’s more or less how it works with me. Sure, I calculate, but only because I consider that to be the best way to behave as morally as I possibly can.

Other people might find that to be a strangely cold way to approach morality, and I will cop to it being strange. I am a strange guy and do things in strange ways.

But I am not cold. I have the same moral feelings as anyone else.

I just act on them in a slightly different way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.