Remember this guy?

One is my name. The other is not.

As I have been exploring the idea that I am slightly autistic, I have found myself thinking ab out this guy a lot.

The character, as some of you knoiw, is extremely popular in the autism spectrum community because he like all of us with so much as a toe on that scale,. is trying to figure out how to be human without having access to the suite of instincts that most people don’t even know they have and therefore don’t have any way to explain these things to those of us forever locked into remedial social skills class.

Don’t you wish that was a real thing?

Data’s struggle to be human, therefore, maps quite well to the confusion, pain, and difficulty those on the spectrum have with trying to lear n to cope with a world where must people have a sense we lack.

Aside, feel free to skip : why does science fiction always assume that the robot wants to be human? What possible reason would it have to want to be more human? Actual autism spectrum people wants to learn to be human because they are humanand therefore have the same need for things like connection with others, a peer group, the respect of said peer group, and all the rest.

But the easy route to those goals is blocked by the disability. ^[1] So us spectrum types have to take the very long route toi get to our social goals and a lot of us just plain don’t make it. Instead, we join communities where the mutual understanding and support creates a positive environment in which it is safe to lack that certain social something that allows normal poeople to get along with others.

Myself, I am a strange case in point^[2]. Like others further down the spectrum, I also had to figure people out the hard way rather than relying on social instincts. And while that definitely led to social isolation and a lot of pain and abuse I didnt understand, I was lucky enough to be both extremely analytical and highly sensitive. And that meant I had everything I needed to figure out how people tick by observation (largely through TV – explains a lot, doesn’t it) and analysis.

A big part of that analaysis was the emotional impressions I got from my empathic antennae, which thankfully is more or less fully intact. I have never had a big problem understanding people’s motives and reactions. I find it easy to imagine stories in which people interact in a realistic way. I have excellent theory of mind.

But before it starts to sound like I have it TOO good, all of this well developed social insight and whatnot works flawlessly – in analysis. You know, when I have time to think about what is going on.

In realtime,. however, I have to go with my instincts because otherwise I would not be able to keep up with the flow of conversation. I still think about what I am saying a lot more than most people, but I still have to work at conversational speed and not at the speed of deep, quiet, thoughtful analysis.

I am super good at deep, quiet,. thoughtful analysis.

I am also lucky (for the most part) that my default social mask is a pleasant , likeable fellow I have the sorts of verbal and artistic skills that can be great substitutes for social skills if applied properly.

That’s the secret behind the shy artist, by the way,. We develop our artistic skills because we have a lot of difficulty expressing ourselves directly due to our lack of social skills and/or connection.

So all that human potential that was supposed to go into developing complex social skills goes into our art instead.

And now you know.

Meanwhile, back at the topic, I was lucky in that despite total social isolation for a great deal of my childhood, I had the basic tools to at least get by.

That’s more than can be said for those far further down the autism spectrum than I. I know a fair number of people with mild to moderate Asperger’s Syndrome and I can see their struggles and empathize with them deeply because they are a lot like mine.

They only differ in degree.

And because I feel for them so much, and because I am incapable of ignoring a problem that I think I might be able to fix, I feel driven to try to help these people byh trying to help them escape some of the ideas about the world that they developed for very good reasons but which prevent them from recovering.

That tends to go about as well as you’d expect. Most people do not want their eyes open and their horizons broadened, especially not by a friendly robot like myself.

Most people would prefer to just keep on believing that reality as they know it is reality as it is, and when you try to wake them from their dreaming, they throw the alarm clock at you and tell you to STFU.

Can’t say I blame them. I would probably resent it if I was them. I’m not them, I’m an out of control radical genius who thrives on new ideas and points of view and who is always happy to look at things from a new perspective.

In fact, due to my absentminded nature, I am always paranoid aboiut there being something I missed, and so every new perspective helps soothe that paranoid as it gets integrated into my world view.

But I can do that because I have a high IQ and no life. My software would not run on most people’s hardware. It is far too resource intensive and they have a million differen tthings to think about (job, spouse, kids, taxes, mortgage, friends, office politics) and all I do is play video games and think about stuff.

Often at the same time!

And I am humble and realistic enough to realize that despite my big bad brain, there are billions of people in the world who know and understand things I never will because their social skills are instinctual and mine are learned.

IQ only goes so far. Wizards only know so many tricks.

After that, you have to actually deal with people.

And then what?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God, it sucks to have to force myself to eat when I have zero appetite.

It sucks because it means overriding, by sheer force of will, the messages from one of our strongest drives, appetite.

We tend not to think of our appetite as being a powerful drives because in modern society it is regularly satiated in most circumstances. This is so true that most of us have never experienced true hunger because most of us have never gone more than twelve hours without food.

But there is a reason people say that any society is only three meals away from a revolution. It’s the same reason why when we try to imagine a sympathetic crime, we imagine a starving man stealing a loaf of bread.

We all intuitively grasp that hunger has the power to make people do things they would not ordinarily do. And most people would consider those things justified.

Hunger is not to be fucked with.

But fuck with it I must, albeit in the opposite direction. My body really does not want me to eat right now. It is sending me powerful signals to that effect. I am at the nadir of appetite where eating itself seems gross and bizarre.

I mean, sticking oraganic matter into my saliva dripping maw and then crushing it into a paste before swallowing it?

How very weird.

But still, I am eating. I am eating because I know that my appetite is a dumbass that doesn’t know what is good for it. I know that it is so staggeringly stupid that it will turn off as a response to low blood sugar, which you can only cure by EATING SOMETHING.

And that realization helps. It really does. Knowing that my appetite is not to be trusted and that I have to eat in order to keep myself from feeling really, really bad and that once I have eaten I will feel better really helps to overcome the bad messages I am getting from my stupid body.

It’s like it doesn’t even have a brain.

Being able to override those urgent biological messages takes character. or guts, or grit, or whatever you want to call it. And it is what truly defines adulthood, in my opion.

I have talked about this many times before. My rough definition of character is the ability to choose pain. That means knowing something is going to hurt and doing it anyway because you want what you will get out of that something.

Note that this is not, I repeat. NOT about suffering for no reason or suffering to prove what a manly man you are. Fuck that shit. People who suffer for no reason are dumbasses who don’t understand nature.

No, what I am talking about is overcoming your natural instinct to avoid pain in order to achieve a goal. A goal you choose for yourself.

It sounds simple enough but a lot of people get hung up on it, sometimes for decades. Myself included. And it doesn’t matter how smart you are because this is not a function of intelligence. It is a matter of your connection with your will, and that is something those of us in the high IQ set often have a problem with because it’s so emotional.

And not even the fancy complex emotions that an overweaning ego can kind of be cool about. Nope,. these are the deep, primal, gritty, sweaty, ugly, animal emotions that happen on so deep a level that it is practically invisible to us due to our incredibly strong instinct blocking filters.

The very filters that allow us to be so smart, IMHO. In order to develop a high IQ, a child needs tto block out the “noise” of their senses and instincts so they can concentrate on the kinds of abstract symbol manipulation skills that modern society values.

And speaking as a victim of a very high IQ, I can say that is certainly true with me. And let me tell you, it can produce some pretty amazing results. I owe all my wizardly powers to developing that powerful filter at a very early age.

Thanks, traumatic childhood!

But I think it also leads ot a lot of the problems we face. Like physical coordination. On the surface, there is nothing that connects high IQ with poor physical coordination. The two seem to have nothing to do with one another.

The connection is instinct.  The human body has an extraordinary set of complex physical coordination instincts that allow us to do all kinds of amazing things.

But they are still instincts, and so if you have this thick filter that blocks out messages from your instincts, you do not have access to these abilities. You will instead try to re-invent the wheel by trying to figure out how to do this things with your top-level rational mind, and that is a task for which it is ill-suited.

Thinking is just too damned slow for robust physical engagements with reality in realtime. Only instinct has the speed to handle complex physical tasks because only instinct can go from stimulus to action without having to go through a long detour through the rational mind.

And that’s why we smarty pants types suck at gym. Write that down. It’ll be on the test.

And it’s also what leads us to our social problems as well. Social skills also require tapping into our instincts, in this case our social instincts. These largely revolve around empathy but also include theory of mind, rule deduction, and so on.

And it’s not just a matter of accessing those instincts. It’s a matter of acting on them, or rather, getting out of their way so they can act for you, with the rational mind reduced to a supervisory role.

And acting without thinking and trusting your instincts are inimical to the high IQ mindset. We feel like acting purely out of emotion (in other words, without thought) is a a sure recipe for total disaster and just about the most embarrassing thing ever.

And there’s so much wrong with that, I don’t even know where to begin.

It will have to wait for another blog entry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Short version: it sucks.

I have confirmation on this.

My therapist has a friend in the industry and that friend told him, completely unprompted, that nobody in the business has any respect for a degree from VFS.

And you know what? I am not surprised. Not in the slightest. Because the education I got there was pathetic. Practically worthless.

Why? Because the leadership sucked.

I am talking about you, Michael Baser. I wasn’t surprised when you agreed to head a totally different faculty while still heading the Writing faculty.

Ya know why? Because you do jack shit at Writing, so how big a deal of it to do jack shit for two? Why not three, or ten, or all of them?

You know there is a serious lack of leadership at an educational institution when the teachers can get away with not bothering to do ANY grading until the students are on break between terms?

I mean, what kind of bullshit fucking system is that?

And I get it, Mike. I really do. Like a lot of creative types, you don’t like being the authority figure who tells people they have to do things and pushes them to try hard or really does anything at all to safeguard the quality of the education the kids get.

And besides, all that really matters is that the kids get the certificate with their name and VFS on it at the end, so why try hard at all?

I mean, a VFS education will always open tons of doors for people so why should you bother to do such hard and non-fun things as take an active interest in students,  worry whether some of them were falling through the cracks, making allowances for those struggling with mental illness, and especially not talking to students who are definitely not getting recommendations from any teacher if that student is sort of scary and gross.

That’s why I only found out about the contempt in which they all held me on my second last day of classes, when it was far far too late to do anything about it. Sure, they could have told me when I first did things that bugged them, but that would have taken effort and concentration and actual commitment to the welfare and education of students even when they are not excellent sheep like the rest of the students and dare to have an actual personality.

And now you’re just talking crazy! I mean, what kind of lunatic would bother to help someone if it was, like, hard?

And hey, we’re basically in the business of selling worthless pieces of paper for $20,000 a pop, and why would yuou want to ruin a sweet racket like that with something as crude and unpleasant as real effort?

That’s why are the teachers are so slack. They made it very clear that their goal was to make it through the class with as little effort as possible and then leave and completely forget about us until the next one.

And they had enormous help with the sweetest scam since group therapy : peer review! It’s like magic because it makes the kids do most of the work. They write the things. They review each other’s work. You can also review their work if you’re one of lunatics that does that kind of thing, but you don’t have to. Nobody is going to make you.

But even if you decide to go that route, you will only be doing as much work as your students do.  That seems fair, right?

Why should you work harder than they do? That would be almost like working for a living. And fuck THAT, am I right?

And here’s the best part : you don’t even have to put a grade on it. Sure, that would give student a concrete way of measuring whether they are getting any better at writing, but grades are all gross and mathy and stuff, so why bother?

It’s perfectly fine that all our students know is that no matter how hard they try, everyone is going to find fault with their work anyway because that is what they are supposed to do. Maybe it’s getting better, maybe it’s getting worse. Who knows?

And more importantly, who cares?

And it’s all because of you, Mike Baser. The rot starts at the top. All the teachers that work for you are confused and uncertain and demoralized because you do not give them any leadership at all. Many of them are very worried about what kind of education the kids are getting but none of them want to say anything about it.

And you know why? It’s because everybody likes you. After all, you’re a great guy. Funny, nice, warm, and easy to get along with. What’s not to like?

And because people like you, they do not want to say anything to upset you. They might talk amongst themselves about the problems they see, but even then, they will almost never directly criticize you because they know that everyone likes you and that therefore the slightest criticism will draw the wrath of all your other adherents.

Plus, according to what I have overheard, you are not above (in fact, significantly below) punishing people for daring to criticize you or complain at all by other means. Like firing them, for instance. And not even firing them to their face, because of course, that would mean doing somethung unfun and difficult so why bother?

No, tbhey would only find out they were fired when they went to get their paycheck and there wasn’t one. Or they would be told by another teacher. Or their contract would not be renewed and no explanation would be given.

You’re a two-faced coward, Michael Baser, and you are terrible at your job. If the industry no longer values a degree from VFS, it’s because people like you have let everything go all to hell while maintaining your happy little bubble where you are the fun uncle of all these kids when you should also be their disciplinary parent.

So buck the fuck up, Uncle Buck, and do your goddamned job.

Because remember, you teach writers, and writers have the power to hurt you with their words when they realize how badly they got screwed.

And some of them, like myself. are not the excellent sheep that you are used to fleecing for $20K a pop, four times a year.

Some of us are wolves.

And we’re getting really fucking hungry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But not like this.

Damn I am funny.

But no, what I am going to talk about tonight is the struggle I am having between the sweet and gentle person I am (most of the time) and the flaming raging arsehole that my id wants me to be.

Turns out,. this whole integrating you id into your psyche after ignoring and suppressing it for most of your life is kind of…. tricky.

Because the bad stuff I have been thinking lately really, really wants to come out. And it flares up at the slightest annoyance. I feel besieged by my own hair-trigger sarcasm and biting back those words is a daily struggle.

Of course, my wants me to give in and let it run loose. That’s what the id always wants in one form or another.

If my id had its way. I would tturn into an angry dragon that roars and breathes fire until all know and fear my name and nobody is ever going to ignore, step on, or deny my reality ever again unless they want to risk my sick burns.

And you know the form my fire would take. Words. Oh so many words. The urge to use the enormous power of my words is strong and getting stronger. Words are my weapon, my shield, and my nuclear arsena. I have felt their power for a long time, in an abstract way. Same with my enormous intelligence. I felt its power too.

But without a healthy id, all the power did was scare the daylights out of me. It made me far too worried that my slightest move could hurt someone, and there was no way I was even vaguely ready to take on the weight of responsibility such power implies.

Perhaps if I were a more irresponsible, that would not be such a deal. WIthout my deep and precise belief that power and responsibility are always exactly equal, I would be freer to throw my mental weight around for my own advantage or even just for my own amusement, or just to see if I can do it.

But the degree to which power and responsibilty are equal is my definition of justice, and therefore I cannot tolerate any discrepency within myself.

That dog don’t hunt.

However, it is possible that when it comes down to the fine details, I am too harsh on myself,. and imagine small insensitivies as massive crimes and give other people way too little credit for being able to handle less than perfect behaviour on my part.

I mean, I have very high moral standards but I am a human being, not an angel, and I should give myself the exact same kind of kindness, forgiveness, and understanding that I give to everybody else.

I’m working on it.

Back to that angry dragon. It’s a product of decades of deep, deep imbalance in my psyche. The id is there for a reason. It is not optional, despite what the ego thinks. There is no such thing as the ego flying free of the id into some kind of falsely dichotomous state where the mind is “pure energy”, whatever the fuck THAT means.

Might as well be talking about “pure mass”. The mass of what?

Because this imbalance has been so profound for so long,. correcting it means letting the pendulum freely swing the other way and back until it runs out of energy and comes to rest in the moderate middle.

Otherwise known as “sanity”.

So it’s going to be a bumpy trip, to put it mildly. I am only connecting now with emotions most people learn to deal with their teens. Rage. Lust. Ambition. Desire.

You know. all the really fun stuff that they love to put on movie posters and the covers of potboiler romance novels.

Dealing with this stuff is like getting the German Measles – the older you are, the worse it’s going to be.

It’s clear to me now that if nature had taken its course, I would have “blossomed” into a rude, angry, sarcastic teen (in other words, a teen) and that would have led me to a lot of butting heads with authority – especially as school – and generally being that raging flaming arsehole I mentioned earlier until I had vented enough and matured enough to calm the fuck down and get a grip on myself.

And wow, would I have been obnoxious. Way more then the usual teen, because the usual teen is restrained by social worries. lack of confidence, and the limits of their budding intellects and verbal skills.

I have no such limits. I have total intellectual confidence at all times – that comes from always being the smartest person in the room starting in Grade One.

I have always been willing to make a big scene if it suits me.

Deep down, I don’t give a fuck what people think of me. I have always been ferociously myself no matter what, and that has always trumped any concerns I might have had about beng popular and fitting in.

Ironically. that might have made me pretty popular if it came with the confidence and a certain degree of calculated aggression.

Oh, and we can’t forget my deep level of psychological insight, because that’s what would make my sarcasm really hurt.

I can see people’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. I can see everything. It takes no effort. It’s as basic to how I see the world as my sense of sight.

Being a very nice and very sensitive person, I do not exploit this knowledge for personal gain and I would never use it to hurt someone except in self-defense,and that would have to be a pretty desperate situation for me to feel it is justified.

I’ve done it accidentally or in reaction before, and the guilt is… indecribable.

But without crippling neurosis. I might have taken that bad path I feel I narrowly avoided because some people were nice enough to explain things to me.

I might have become that obnoxious, manipulative, arrogant, self-centered asshole who loves nothing more than proving how much smarter than everyone else he is by taking whatever the fuck strikes his fancy and leaving people without a single way to object because they are simply not articulate enough to describe what I did to them.

I hate that version of me. But he will always be there in potentia. My id integration (idtegration?) has woken him up like never before.

And it’s up to me to make sure that other, better versions of myself win out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I am not talking about the kind you use to get out of work for the day or explain the lipstick on your collar.

“Remember those people who used to spritz you perfume? They sell lipstick now. :

No, I am talking about the excuses we depressives cling to in order to avoid facing the real issue. We clutch them like talismans, and on each is written “get out of this free”.

Because that’s all these excuses really boil down to. Permission to quit.  To give up, back down. play dead like a possum, or otherwise jettison all your hopes and dreams and self-worth like drugs thrown overboard when the Coast Guard shows up.

Without these excuses, we would have to face the facts head on : we give up on things because we get scared when things get hard.

So we need these excuses in order to save our fragile selves from having to really try. We go into anything even remotely difficult for us with our excuses held out in from of us like they will ward off Dracula, ready to hit the eject button at any second.

The the brutal truth is that we want to press that button. We can’t wait to press that button. We’re looking forward to it.

Because when we do, the sudden relief of tension and fear feels marvelous. Marvelous enough to mask the fact that we just fucked ourselves over rather than endure one more second of emotional discomfort. Marvelous enough to keep us ignorant of all long term goals and all enlightened self-interest and all trust and belief in ourselves because phew, at least we didn’t have to endure emotional discomfort.

I mean, nobody does that…. right?

In the past, I have phrased it, quite cynically, as “Hey, you know that thing you do where you get freaked out and give up and run away? Don’t do that. ”

That’s all it really boils down to. Stay in the game. Don’t press the button. Don’t listen to the voice of panic that tells you that if you don’t escape RIGHT NOW, you will DIE!

Obviously not, unless you have some kind of serious health issue. You won’t die. And once panic realizes it’s not going to win, it goes away. And then you realize that it was the panic that was the problem in the first place.

Now that you’re past it, you realize that whatever triggered it is no big deal. It is totally handleable. You will wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place.

The fuss came from depression/anxiety doing what it does best : lying to you.

The disease loves to make you freak out over nothing.  That’s how it exerts its power over you. That’s how it enforces its will.

It knows that, any time it wants to, it can punish you with depression and/or anxiety and keep you totally subservient to it like it’s an abusive relative.

Try this : imagine what you would do if the depression/anxiety was not there to punish you for violating its rules.

Are you imagining it? Good. Now how does it feel?

Is it an awesome, liberating feeling that makes you want to rush out into the world and take on all comers in order to get the life you deserve?

Or does it scare you? Make you feel exposed? Fill you with a terrible dread? Maybe make you want to run away and hide?

But why? What’s WITH that? Depression and anxiety are bad. You know they are the reason you life has not turned out how you wanted it to. It’s clearly the worst thing to ever happen to you and it’s the thing that makes everyday life such a struggle.

So it going away should be a good thing. Right? Best thing ever, even. So why the hesitation? Why the fear? Why the reluctance?

Could it be that there is more going on here that you know?

Could it be that your mind has an elaborate smoke and mirrors routine designed to keep you exactly where you are?

Could it be that depression is the biggest excuse of them all?

That the real function of your depression is to protect you from the real world putting up barriers between you and it that keep the real world, the one in which you are expected to grow up, safely away from you?

Why, that would mean that you are willing (on some level) to endure all the hells of depression and anxiety as long as it keeps that barrier up between you and life.

And these barriers have to come in the form of pain because that’s what convinces you that they are real.

There are happier ones as well that circulate in your mind like bad influences just waiting to put their arm around your shoulders and gently and compassionately cheer you up by convincing you to go with your worst, most destructive habits.

They too work for your disease. They are the good cops to depression/anxiety’s bad cop. Depression/anxiety beats you up and shoves you arund and the the bad influence shows up to lead you astray.

And you can spend your whole life bouncing between those two motherfuckers.

Or you can face the truth, no matter how painful, because you know that on the other side of that pain is a stronger, healthier, happier you.

The first step is to imagine a differe way to be. Imagine yourself looking at the good and bad cops and saying “Fuck you. I’m not playing this game any more. ”

You have the power to stop the film and step out of the frame. To imagine an entirely new context for your life and then hold on to that image no matter how hard your depression/anxiety tries to rip it away from you.

Because in the end, it is your mind, your soul, and your mental real estate.

Depression and anxiety are just squatters on your land.

And you have the power to evict them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am one.

And right now, I am a very annoyed one, as the sun is shining RIGHT into my eyes and I am having to duck down like I am afraid of enemy fire in orer to be able to see the screen at all.

That was annoyoing enough when I was trying to play my video game, but now it is interfering with my blogging and thaty is Serious Business.

Or what passes for it in the tiny village that is my life.

That segues into what I really wanted to talk about tonight, which is a question that occurred to me earlier that I thought was well worth exploring :

How would my life be different if I lived in a small town, like the one I’m from.

The gut instinct would be to say small town life is horrible and there is a reason I moved away from the Island and its stifling smallness.

That three weeks around Xmas that I spent back home in Summerside were more than enough to convince me that there was no way I could live there any more.

It felt like everyone, including my family, were sleepwalking. And they had no idea they were doing it. When everyone is moving at the same slow speed and nobody has anything to compare it to and no frame of reference to gauge their speed against, nobody notices that life is very, very slow.

Its like being on a bus with no windows.

Just thinking about it gives me existential claustrophobia. And yet, when you break it down into the pragmatic pieces of my life, things start to break down.

But first, a caveat : this thought experiment assumes that my current set of friends stays with me. How? Dunno.

Don’t argue with the givens.

So what do I actually do in my life? Most of the time I am here at this computer, either using the internet or playing a video game.

Neither of those activities are bound to a particular location. My home town has the internet. I could blog from there and thanks to Steam, I buy all my video games over the internet as well, so there would be no problem there.

What else do I do? I hang out with my friends and watch videos. The videos come from the internet and presumably wherever I lived, I would have living space I could use to play videos and hang with my friends.

I also go out to dinner with my friends. But where do we go? Denny’s and another chain family style restaurant. There’s no unique little bistro I would just DIE without. We could do the exact samel thing back home. I doubt Summerside has a Denny’s, but it has their equivalent in one form or the other.

The only other thing I do is go to therapy and my GP. My home town definitely has GPs, like the family doctor I grew up with, Doctor Saunders.

Individual therapy…. maybe. Probably not once a week, though. My current therapist, Doctor Costin, says individual therapy is going out of style fast. Which is a depressing fucking thought, because the alternative is group therapy and if I was healthy enough for group therapy to work, I wouldn’t need therapy in the first place!

I’m a rather unqiue person and I have massive social issues due to a socially isolated chilhdood, teen years, and pretty much the rest of my life circa now.

Group therapy just makes me feel ignored, misunderstood, and even more isolated.

It’s bad enpough to be lonely, but to be lonely in a crowd is the absolute worst.

So I end up falling naturally into Junior Therapist mode. I ask others about their problems and do my best to facilitate their therapeutic process by asking the kind of questions that aid their catharsis.

And I really enjoy that role. It’s not like when I am in it, I feel like I am forced into a role I hate by my issues.

And I am really good at it. It’s a tragedy, really, that I didn’t stick with school and become a therapist. It’s a job that I enjoy and excel it, and I am positive I would find extremely fulfilling. To help people with their demons would be a beautiful privilege to me.

Maybe it’s not too late.

Now where was I before I activated my own issues… oh right, small town.

So on the practical side, except for a certain iffyness about the availability of individual therapy,. I could have the exact same life I have now in a small town.

Except for one incredibly important and tricky to justify scientifically the : the vibe.

What WAS it in the air that made me feel so out of place when I visited home? How can it be that one place can have such a radically differtent baseline emotional affect from another? What kind of mechanism could possibly exist that does that?

I can only blame pheremones. They have an effect on out minds that is both massive and completely unconcious. There must be instincts hardwired into our nervous systems that tell us how many other monkeys are around and what kind of things they are doing and where our place is relative to those variables.

Makes me wonder if, via experiment, you could expose people from one kind of area to the air from another kind of area and see what effect, if any, it has.

So presumably,  somewhere in the deep electrochemical relays of my being, there is a sense of where I belong and that is a place with a lot of other monkeys doing a lot of different things around me.

Strange considering my social issues, but whatever.

Whatever this strange variable is, it would assure me that I would be miserable living back home in Summerside. Even if my life was otherwise identical.

There uis a reason I felt stifled on PEI and feel juch better here in the big city.

And I would love to know what it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So let’s talk about suicide. Other people’s, that is.

It’s been on my mind lately because I have been reading books by H. Beam Piper, a science fiction writer from the Fifties and Sixties who many consider to have been just as good as Asimov and Heinlein but who died before reaching their status.

And he died by his own hand. Suicide. He falsely believed his career to be over and faced enormous debts and these two factors drove him into a deep despair from which suicide seemed like the only possible relief.

I know what that’s like. To feel like suicide is the only way to escape your pain. To have that evil voice whispering in your ear, like the Serpent of Eden, telling you how all it would take is one powerful, decisive act, and your pain would be gone forever and the world will be a better place without you, and that nobody would even care.

Dark stuff, I know.

But I never attempted suicide. I made is through the valley of self-inflicted death and I haven’t been suicidal for a long long time.

And part of what keeps me out of that worst of states of mind is that I could never do something so horrible to those who care about me.

Suicide is an act of brutal violence that hurts everyone in the person’s life in a way that nothing else can. Having someone taken from your life by violence is bad enough, but to have it be at their own hand brings things to a whole new level.

Everyone whose lives you touched will feel like someone just ripped their arm off. And it wasn’t some random stranger, it was someone they loved. Someone whom they cared about and now wish they could comfort and protect after the fact.

Because from now on, they will wonder what they could (or should) have done to keep it from happening. Sadly, the answer is usually “nothing”. Depression is extremely resistant to external pressures because it is fundamentally a question of brain chemistry and it’s hard to change that with words.

It’s a battle that due to its very nature must be fought alone.

That doesn’t mean that people should not try to help us depressed types. We need all the help we can get, even if we don’t always appreciate it and often fight the very aid we asked for so pathetically.

Small kindnesses and gentle, supportive actions all help. We remember these things and they can be a great comfort when we are feeling like nobody cares about us and the world is a black and broken place filled with nothing but a long slide down the razor blade of life into the final peace of oblivion.

We need every bit of help fighting back the madness we can get. Fighting your own brain chemistry and remembering that life is not how it feels is extemely hard to do and we need people who shine a light into our lives.

But there is no guarantee that it will keep us from killing ourselves.

Sad but true.

Part of what makes suicide such a terrible act of violence against all who know you is that depression itself is so incomprehensible to normal people, let alone why it would drive someone to do the most incomprehensible act imaginable.

And I have often tried to imagine how depression looks from the outside. It is not a pretty picture. It mjust seem to others like someone their either do bnot understand at all or something they understand enough to not want to know any more.

They fear, not without cause, that if they really understood depression, it would claim them as well.

There are things most people should not think about too much.

I try to keep this truth in mind when I read about some of the highly insensitive things people say to us depressed type people. It is not their fault that they simply do not get it. Most people cannot.

After all, fish don’t know they’re wet. To suffer from depression is to lack something most people don’t even know they have, let alone that it could go missing.

One could describe said missing factor in a lot of different ways, but to me, it fundamentally comes down to a lack of connection to humanity.

The numbness of depression cuts suffers like myself off from the rest of hujmanity. We don’t feel the presence of others, or if we do, it’s as though from very far away.

That’s very bad for a social species like humanity. We naked apes need to feel like we are part of a tribe of other naked apes or we end up feeling like we must be very bad apes who are isolated because of something we have done.

Or worse, because of something we are.

It comes down to something as simple as punishment and reward. Depression’s deadly anesthetic drastically reduces our ability to find anything rewarding. Without rewards, and with the punishment of all the negative emotions of depression, we do not get any of our behaviours reinforced and thus we have no input as to what will make us feel better. We end up slaves to the few things that hit the reward center of our brains so incredibly hard that even our benumbed minds can feel it.

Like junk food. OIr liquor. Or drugs. Or pretty much anything else that feels good. We end up abusing these things because they are seem like they are our only route to anything even approaching happiness.

The real cure would be to reduce the numbness. Perhaps that’s all that antidepressants really do. But we all know that the real cure is to resolve the traumae that are the reason the mind puts out all this numbness in the first place.

And that’s not easy and it takes a lot of time and it means you are going to have to think about the very things you least want to think about in the whole wide world.

But it’s the only road out of this stinkin’ town.

And I aim to take it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The flaming wreck of what was once part of a car provides the only light on this strip of melted, twisted asphalt. The fire shines defiantly, as if daring the darkness to object, and in this post-apocalyptic Earth, it is the most beautiful Rico, Dirk’s boy, has ever seen in his eighteen years of life. 

That’s approximately how I feel right now. Like I am the lone survivor of a horrible plane crash sitting there in shock, watching the flames consuming a random piece of the fuselage, too dazed to even be happy that I am alive.

So, something something staring at fire.

This is where I talk about envying visual artists. I have these powerful images in my head that I would love to share with the world but I have none of the necessary skills.

Then again, I can share those images with you, my patient reader, via a few minutes of typing, and I am sure there are visual artists who would envy the fuck out of that.

That’s another reason I could never be a visual artist. It’s so much work!

So right now, I feel sort of dazed and I am looking around at the wreckage of my life and wondering how the hell I got here, what the hell happened, and what the hell am I supposed to do now?

Part of me wants to wander off into the desert and lose myself in the shifting sands. This would be stupid as hell, of course, and I would probably die.

Still, it has its allure. It would be nice to finally escape myself somewhere where I am not merely unknown but unknowable because there is nobody there to know me.

Coyotes and bunnies don’t count.

And it would be nice to, as Douglas Coupland put it, “lose all unwanted momentums” and find out what life is like when the voices in my head run out of things to talk about.

I think the real allure, though, is that it would be a time where I could finish all my thoughts. Without my computer, the Internet, books, TV, or any other source of distraction and stimulation, my brain could finally catch up with the backlog and finish all the incomplete thoughts echoing around in my mind and maybe I would finally know an inner quiet that would let me, at long last, be truly calm.

Plus, I’d probably masturbate a lot. Those desert prophets never mention THAT.

The idea of inner silence both pleases and frightens me. It would be great to finally get some real rest instead of sleeping in a madhouse all the time. ECT science proves that a lot of what compromises depression is just the lingering effects of long term exposure to too much mental noise and a clean reboot of your brain works wonders.

Don’t call it electroshock, though. All it does is reboot the brain and that can be done with an extremely small shock if you know where to apply it.

A brain reboot sounds wonderful to me. My mind has a very advanced CPU and yet there is so much lag in the system because of all these programs running at the same time hogging all the available memory with their resource heavy OS operations.

Might be nice to get rid of all that clutter.

On the other hand, I feel the same kind of nameless dread when I imagine what having a clear mind that I have when I imagine that this room of mine as spotlessly clean.

The sane side of me thinks that sounds wonderful. At long last, tidiness, organization, and structure in my environment. Neato.

But the deep down dark crazy side of me is freaking out because then all my bad stuff would come out.  And that would be the worst thing ever. That must never, ever be allowed to happen. If that happened, people would see what a gross, disgusting. multi-toxic thing I am and that would annihilate me.

At least, that’s how it feels.

It’s a lot like nausea. It’s the feeling that there is something in you that is trying to come out and your body is trying to make that happen but your mind is fighting it, tooth and nail, and winning.

Now would be a good time to remind my patient readers that my mother and I, who arfe a lot alike, both have bizarrely high nausea tolerance.

This metaphor works on so many levels.

But seriously…. what is the worst that could happen if all my bad stuff “came out”.  Sure, it would, no doubt, be a horrifying and disgusting experience and I might have to go through a period of feeling profound shame and humiliation and the desire to go hide away from everything forever.

But I would still be there afterwards. So would the world. No annihilation would have occurred. In fact, based on my experience in these things, I’d expect that :

1. It would not be nearly as bad as I thought
2. People would understand and forgive
3. I would feel a whole lot better afterward, and
4. I would wonder why I hadn’t done it ages ago.

The answer to that last question is far too complicated to get into right now,. but the short answer is. it ain’t that simple.

A runner doesn’t cross the finish line and say “D’uh! That whole thing was about crossing the finish line! Why didn’t I do that at the start?”.

So letting it all come up and get out is definitely the sound, wise,. practical, sensible thing to do. Cost benefit analysis clearly shows that the long term benefits more than justify the short term unpleasantness.

And yet… and yet… here comes that same old fear.

Because if I rid myself of my toxins…. what then? What does that brave new world look like? And who would I be? Someone I wouldn’t even recognize?

And would that be such a bad thing? Being who I am right now sure as fuck isn’t working out too well for me.

Maybe I need to discard who I am right now in order to become what I am meant to be.

Time to spin the coccoon and go to sleep a caterpillar so I can wake up a butterfly.

Time to be…. reborn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Imagine this conversation :

A : What do you think of happy people
B : Stupid. They must be stupid. Only stupid people are happy.
A : Are you a stupid person?
B : No I am not.
A: And you don’t want to be a stupid person.
B : Of course not.
A : So you don’t want to be happy.
B : ….huh….

That’s what I will be talkoing about tonight. What would it mean to be happy? What do we think of happy people? Would we be comfortable with someone pointing at us and saying “now there’s a very happy person. ” And if not, why not?

Are we afraid that if people think we are happy, we will stop getting stuff?

But if you’re happy, why do you need more stuff?

Are we afraid of our own happiness because we know, deep down, that if we were happy we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves any more.

The pursuit of happiness drives our lives. Nobody said anything about actually catching it. The pursuit of happiness in its various forms – wealth, status, sex, social superiority, spiritual enlightenment, and everything else we think will make us happy – has taken over the job of religion in terms of giving direction and purpose to our lives.

If that stopped – if we reached a point where we could say we had reached that mythical town called Happy and could declare ourselves to have enough – we would lose the whole foundation of our lives and would have no idea what to do with ourselves.

We’d be like wealthy retirees, slowly going crazy precisely because we have no purpose any more and there are only so many goddamned cruises you can take before you get sick of indulging yourself and want to do something useful with your time.

Okay, I might have taken that analogy a little too far.

My point is, on some level we know that to actually reach that town called Happy would rob our lives of all purpose and direction and that’s why so many of us end up either turning away at the last second or sabotaging our own engines along the way.

The paradox of it all is that if we truly recognized this in our culture and embraced our own basic hedonism, it would stop working. Believing that there really is a place called Happy gives people that all important focus in their lives that will get them through the day and make them feel like there is a point to their lives.

If we truly understood the futility of this seach for our Happy place, we would have to deal with one of the darkest and deepest secrets of modern society, which is that it does not give people everything they need. 

Human beings have many needs that cannot be met via spending money and that therefore modern consumer capitalism does not have a reason to serve.

If the fundamental problem is that you are lonely and wish you had more friends, there is no way to buy friends. None. You could pay people to pretend to be your friends, either overtly or implicitly. You can buy membership in someplace where you are more likely to meet someone whom you could befriend. You can even hang out with people you intensely dislike that you call friends.

But no amount of money in the world can actually get you a real friend. Friendship is a genuine emotional connection and those cannot be bought or sold.

People really don’t like it when I point this out to them. The fact that money can buy happiness is one of the most cherished beliefs in the modern world. Billions are spent daily on ways to try to meet these emotional needs via material means. Whether it’s compensating for a feeling of intellectual inferioirity by buying a book that makes you feel smart when you buy it or trying to fix you feeling of fading and uncertain masculinity by buying a truck because its commercials are so manly or even sending your kids off to an expensive boarding school and telling yourself it’s for their own good when the reality is that no amount of love for your children can overcome your dislike of sharing.

In our lands of plenty, millions suffer the symptoms of spiritual starvation every day. Loneliness, a feeling of emptiness, of life having no meaning and there being no point to anything, isolation,. feeling unhappy for “no reason”… it is a malady which can express itself in many different ways but the route cause is always the same :

Unmet emotional needs we do not even know we have. That’s how spirit-blind we are.

And so we have become a world of addicts. We self-medicate our communal depression with addictions from the obvious (drugs, alcohol) to the outre (sex with strangers, adrenaline junkies) to the downright dangerous (money hoarding, brutal male status seeking on the world stage).

Every one of us modern rats have our own version of the button we push to make the food pellet come out. We all use material means to treat our spiritual diseases instead of finding and treating the root causes of our malaise, which – remember – may very well things which money simply cannot buy.

Things which require things like personal change, risk taking, stepping outside your comfort zone, examining your life in detail, and a lot of other things which might work wonders but are definitely inconvenient.

Worse than that, they take work and sacrifice and risking feeling bad emotions and those are things we just don’t do any more. You know?

That sutff is hard.

And when we aren’t at work, we don’t want to do anything hard.

Especially if it’s something that’s not just hard but uncomfortable and takes a lot of focus and energy.

So if actually making it to that town called Happiness requires any drive, difficulty, discomfort, discipline, or dedication, well, I guess we will just stay unhappy.

It’s much easier to declare there to be something fundamentally wrong with the entire universe because happiness requires doing things we don’t want to do.

Guess it’s just not worth it.

Or at least, that is what we will tell ourselves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.