Repeat after me : Nothing is so good that it can’t be made better.

Call it the Optimizer’s Prayer. It’s something I truly believe, and making things better (or making better things) is what I want to do with my life.

But it is not a matter of faith. It’s based on a lifetime of seeing how things are and imagining how they could be better. That’s all the evidence I need. And the older I get, the better I am at seeing these superior solutions with clarity and certainty.

And the better I am at being to articulate it as well.

And as long as this drive to optimize the world remains withing the soft and cozy walls of sanity, it’s a wonderful thing. I could do the world a lot of good. I could be a pretty amazing guy.

But of course,. I am a crazy person, so my drive to optimize is as corrupt and untrustworthy as any other part of my mindscape.

What happens is that “this could be better” turns into “this should be better” which rapidly devolves into “you should have done better” and finally “you suck because you didn’t do that the best possible way, you useless fucking loser. ”

My mind is stuck in a loop of constantly trying to do my best while constantly failing my own test because I cna always see what I could have done better.

Sometimes it’s hard to see anything else.

The missing ingredient, as usual, is forgiveness. Humanity. An understanding that all I can do is make the best decisions I can based on what I know at the time and the odds are very low that it will be the ideal or even the superior solution because I am not a perfect person.

I hate those perfect people.

SO why do I hold myself to such impossible and inhuman standards? I think it has something to do with being so alone in my formative years that I had to kind of make things up as I went long, and that’s lovely if you’re a jazz pianist but not so good when you are building the mental machinery that you will have for the rest of your life.

In fact, I think a lot of my problems make a lot more sense if you think of me as a grown ass man with a mind designed by a child.

There was nobody else in my head to help me! I was all alone in there. Nobidy was trying to guide me or support me or make sure I got what I needed to develop properly. Nobody gave a significant enough fraction of a shit to actually try to influence me.

Instead. experience taught me to go away and not bother anybody, and I am still doing that to this very day. I sometimes wonder if my agoraphobia is, at its root, a desire to stay out of the way and not be noticed.

After all, there was a time when not being noticed was key to my survival. It was the only way to make it through recess and lunch without getting bullied. And at home, it was the same basic thing. The only safety lay in blending in with the furniture.

So I was a stealth kid. A ghost. I learned to disappear and not draw any attention to myself.

And that’s why, for all my talk abvout walking in the sun and wanting to be a part of life and all that razzamatazz, there is a great and terrible force working against that goal and that is the great fear within me that says that exposure equals danger and my only hope is to remain hidden and hope nobody notices me.

That’s the monster that rears its ugly head every time I think seriously about stepping outside my little box and pushes me firmly back to square one.

It’s the only square I know.

I have been thinking about this great fear a lot lately. It’s also a great sadness. I have spoken before about how when I am gearing up to do something, this great sadness will turns its head away from the world, tears in its eyes, faces the wall, and say “No. ”

And that’s where it stops. Because to proceed would be to enter the territory of the biggest monster of them well, the time I was raped as a child.

I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to see that’s where I first turned my head to the wall and said no. Shut out absolutely everything and took my mind away.

And it’s never come back. It’s too scared.

So I can’t just push past that barrier. Not yet. Maybe in the not too distant future, but I am just plain not there yet.

Of course, ideally, I would be able to do it right now. But I am just too lame.

And just like that he comes full circle and gets back to talking about his brutal and corrupy optimization instincts. Ta da!

Bet ya didn’t see THAT coming!

What is needed is some kind of humanizing factor. Call it the mercy to my judging mind’s justice. The voice that says “But I am, after all, only human. ”

Then adds, “and that’s fine!”.

It says something about one’s unbalanced state of mind when being merely human means you are not good enough.

So I need to learn to show mercy to myself. Forgive myself for being a frail, finite, limited, vulnerable, imperfect naked beach ape and not the superhuman demigod that my overweaning intellect sometimes makes me feel like I am.

It’s hard to see yourself as merely human when you feel the difference between yourself and mainstream humanity so keenly and feel like it has to make you somehow both less and more than the average joe.

Their minds and worlds seem so small and limited to me.

But then again, they’re happy and I’m not.

So what the hell do I know?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Alert readers will recall that I have said that I never had an imaginary friend as a child. I never went through that phase. I was always a strangely literal and self-possessed child who never thought of his stuffed animals as real animals because… they weren’t.

We had a lot of cats. Those were real animals. And they purred and rubbed up against my leg and played with me. What stuffed animal could compare?

Which leads me to what I am pleased to call my point : I did have imaginary friends of a subtler sort than the usual kind depicted in media.

And the cats were part of that. They were my friends because they were companions whom I loved and cherished and who kept me from feeling too lonely. Even when nobody else was paying attention to me, I could always go find a cat and pet it and it would purr and it would love me.

No wonder I am such a cat person.

Mental note : any place I move to has to allow pets, because I am getting me a cat, god dammit. I want my own cat to cherish and look after and pet and cuddle and LOVE.

And I am quite sure I can be a good cat owner. Cats’ needs are simple, after all. They take care of themselves, more or less. Keep the litter box empty and the food and water dishes full and you are good to go,.

Plus, I speak cat, so to speak. I get cats. Growing up surrounded by them and spending so much time with them gave me a lot of time to wonder what was going on in their fuzzy little heads and observe them and their ways.

Plus I know the family secret of how to raise loving, affectionate, wonderful cats : never hold them against their will. Never grab them, especially not suddenly. When they want down, let them down. Let them do their own thing.

Follow those rules religiously and I guarantee you will raise a happy, secure, cuddly cat who is very people friendly.

Where was I? Oh right, imaginary friends.

Now obviously, the cats were not imaginary. They were real cats. I’m crazy but I am not psychotic. I have witnesses.

So they were only imaginary friends in the sense that they were a non-human substitute for having real friends.

Another type of imaginary friend I had was the characters on the shows I liked. As you know, I was largely raised by television (and cats), and the shows I gravitated towards were the ones that gave me a warm feeling of inclusion.

Hence my love of sitcoms. Any decent sitcom has warm, lovable characters who spend a lot of time together and form a family of sorts – either literally or by association.

So whether it was the Huxtables, the cops on Barney Miller, the gang at Cheers, the courtroom of Judge Harold T. Stone from Night Court, or the Keatons from Family Ties, these fictional people and their fictional “families” became extensions of my own family and when I spent time with them, I didn’t feel so alone.

No wonder I want to write for TV. It’s the closest I can get to moving into the TV screen and living with the “family” that doesn’t make me feel like I don’t belong.

Where everybody is witty and funny and everything always works out okay and everyone gets along with one another, even when they fight, and there is a real warmth to their relationship, the kind of emotional warmth I so desperately crave.

It’s so cold in here, I need all the warmth I can get. IT might seem strange to people who know me but don’t know me that well that I might talk about arctic freezeburn of the soul when to them, I seem like such a warm and cuddly guy.

But I can’t feel my own warmth unless it is reflected back to me in someone else. And it’s that craving for reflected warmth that makes me such a warm guy, I think. I have every incentive to output as much warmth as I can in order to maximize the amount that I get back.

So it’s true that making other people happy makes me happy. It really does.

But that has a lot to do with my inability to feel my own happiness, leading me to having to bypass my broken circuits and get my happiness the long way around.

The last and saddest form of imaginary friends from my childhood were the imaginary friendships I had with the small number of fellow students who were sort of nice to me.

Or at least, less actively hostile towards me. They intermittently tolerated me. They were not quite enemies. Whatever.

Now I didn’t go all stalker-crazy on these people and imagine this whole elaborate relationship between us that existed in secret or any of that craziness.

But I did think of them as friends when odds are, they didn’t think of me at all. Or if they did, they were not kind or tolerant thoughts.

I mean, I was such a weird kid. Nothing about me made sense. I was both effortlessly brilliant and hopelessly clueless. I radiated intelligence (still do, apparently) while also being a total slob and kind of gross. I talked like an adult but I acted like a timid toddler. I was both ferociously independent of mine and pathetically dependent of emotions. I got amazing marks without doing anything to “earn” them and worse, seemed to take that for granted instead of seeing it as the valuable thing it should be.

Most people have never met anyone remotely like that and I have never a kid quite like I was depicted in the media. People have no slot to fit me into.

And even though I am a shapeshifter. I can’t/won’t change to fit their slots, either.

Leaving me as a rugged individualist who lives by his own rules.

But not like… on purpose. I have no choice.

Becaause I just got to be me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

I think it’s time I moved on.

The subject cqame up in therapy today. My therapist asked me what I thought would help me to feel better, and I thought about it, then said “a change of environment.”.

It just came to me. And the moment I said it, I knew it was true and that I could no longer dodge the subject, like I had done before.

I need a change of environment. I need pastures anew. I need to go someplace where I can start over with a clean slate and remake myself. Someplace where I am free of past contexts and can find out who I really am.

And that means moving out of my current situation. And that means leaving Joe and Julian. And that’s a pretty big deal.

They have done so much for me and I would hate to seem ungrateful. But I have ot do what it best for myself, and right now, that means moving on.

Now obviously, it’s not going to happen tomorrow. It will take a long time to figure out where I want to live and find a place and move and all that jazz.

But I gotta do it. That’s super clear to me now. It’s time to move on and figure out how to be myself, by myself, with nobody to do things for me and therefore nobody to be dependent on and therefore nobody to feel like a burden on.

It will do me worlds of good to finally live on my own. Somewhere closer to the action. Some nice quiet neighborhood with lots of trees and families and suburban appeal.

Someplace like the neighborhood I grew up in, in other words.

And I want to live in a house again. Admittedly, that conflicts with the idea of living alone because it’s not like there are a lot of houses for rent that I can afford.

Certainly not with the real estate market going manic psychotic right now.

But even without that. I could do maybe a maximum of around $700/month in rent, and that would be really stretching things.

And I am pretty sure they don’t make houses that small. As nice as that would be.

Oh, and Felicity, Julian, don’t worry, I won’t leave your life entirely. I will still be available for our usual kind of hanging out.

It’s a change of living arrangement and that’s it.

But I have to go. I need to find someplace I can truly call my own. Someplace where everything is something I bought and I can arrange it however I like and and thus figure out what kind of environment best suits me.

And I need to be around people who are healthier than I am. I love my friends but we are all kind of broken and I think I need to be around people I can learn from. People who are healthy and strong and engaged with life.

Not totally sure how I would arrange that, but I will figure something out.

And here it is, eight hours later, and I dunno about the whole moving thing. The enthusiasm has faded and with it, the certainty.

But I am tired right now, and therefore not keen on anything that sounds like work. I will see how I feel about the whole idea once I am well rested and alert.

I’ve been pretty sleepy today. Must be time to settled up on all that sleep debt. I feel like I need a long nap just to build up the energy to be sleepy.  I just want to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.

But I know that this, too, is transitory. At some point I will catch up on sleep and come out of that particular fog and get to something like a decent waking state.

Inasmuch as I ever do, I suppose.

I have spoken here before about how when I fall back into the bad habit of not bothering to get dressed if I am not going anywhere, the line between being asleep and being awake can get mighty fine.

In general, that’s the case with my life even with the clothes on. When I am alone in my room, which is most of the time, my state of consciousness is rather blurry around the edges and soft in the middle.

How could it not be? I spend so little time in reality, mentally speaking. I am always wrapped up in the world inside my computer.  Even as I type this, I am filtering out 99 percent of sensory input, making this computer the core of my subjective reality.

And I like that. I like escaping into the computer. When I am absorbed by what I am doing on the computer, my mind is too busy to let things like depression and anxiety in, and I feel safely removed from the reality that I fear.

And yup, that’s bad for me. That is an undisputed fact. If I could stand to spend more time dealing with reality, I could improve my real life to the point where I would not have such a strong need to escape.

Assuming that is possible. The virtual world will always be easier to deal with than the real world because it is less physically stimulating and way easier to control.

So it might be that even if I had the life of my dreams, I would still be tempted to retreat into my computer in one way or another.

It’s kind of like an addiction in that you might recover from it but it never entirely goes away. I will always know there is a solution to life’s complications. One that is terrible for me in the long run, but so very very easy in the short run.

If I am to escape my cage, then, I will need to stand up to that evil voice of sloth, ennui, and apathy in my head and tell it that I Want to get shit done. Period.

But I still have all this sadness inside.

And it keeps getting in the way,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve found myself pondering one of my gifts as a communicator. I am not exactly sure what to call it. I have referred to an aspect of it as my charm before, but it’s much more than that. It’s a way of opening up to others, but it’s not openness or honesty or being genuine. It’s almost like a spell I can weave.

So for now, for lack of a better name, we will call it magic mode.

It’s a mode I can go into where I open up inside and express what I need to express from the very depths of my soul. All barriers between me and others disappear and I speak directly to people’s emotional core, human to human, soul to soul.

On my end, it’s an eerie feeling that chills my blood. But it’s not the chill of depression or pain. It is the space-cold chill of perfect clarity, as if the fog has lifted and everything is as clear and bright as the stars on a cold clear winter’s night.

But it is also a beautiful feeling. A wonderful feeling. In this mode, I can share my emotions in their purest form and know they are going out with perfect fidelity, at least for those who can receive it.

So as chill and aloof as this mode can feel, it’s actually the mode in which I am the most real and honest and present.

It is also a mystical mode. I have access to much that is inaccessible to my busy conscious mind with all its chatter. My intuition flows freely in this mode and it is easy for me to listen deeply to that inner voice and voice what it creates.

Most of the time, my persnickety conscious mind gets in the way by insisting that to give this side of me direct access to reality is madness and chaos. After all, it’s entirely unpredictable and acts without the approval of my cautious, suspicious, foul minded conscious rational mind. And that can only end in disaster.

You know what they call people who do what that part of them tells them to do? Crazy people, that’s what!

But there are worse things than being crazy.

Like being unhappy.

So this magical mode of mine does not guide my actions very much. But it does inform my writing at least some of the time. Especially here, on this blog. When I am sharing my deepest stuff with you nice people, it is usually while in this mode because it is in this mode that I can hear my inner voice and express what it wants me to express and then find out what pops up next.

In fact, I am in that mode right now as I write. And I feel the chill in my blood and that eerie quietness, like being in a mall after it’s closed.

It’s clear to me why this unnatural stillness is required before I can open up emotionally. It’s a question of balance. The deep crystalline chill keeps me balanced and “safe” as I bring up deep emotions that otherwise might upset said balance.

It’s a little bit sad that such a measure is necessary, and it is certainly a sign of how deeply over-intellectual I am that the only way I can deal with my suppressed emotions is to freeze my current ones.

This was commented upon in one of my therapy groups. Someone asked why I went to quiet and low-affect I went when I was talking about what I had been through. And at the time I had no idea. It was one of those things that came to me so naturally that I had never even thought about it before.

Now I know. It’s what needs to happen if I am to let the emotions out without “losing control” and doing something “crazy”.

The interesting thing is the effect this mode has on others. It draws them in and holds them spellbound and fascinated. It’s like the magic of it creates this emotional space that people find irresistable.

Perhaps it is the clarity that holds them spellbound. Most people have never been spoken to so clearly in their lives. Or perhaps it is the unusual intimacy that creates and the strange closeness it brings.

Or perhaps its chilling effect stills all the voices in other people’s heads too, and lets them forget themselves for a while.

Whatever it is, I have been on both side of it. I have seen the effect it has when I use it, and I have experienced it from other really good storytellers.

And it’s not always an ice cold confessional. The same thing on a slightly different frequency is my “visionary mode”. That’s when I am talking about something I truly believe in and kind of project that belief out to others.

It makes me a pretty good orator. I have always done well speaking to an audience. And in general, I am quite confident in front of an audience for the same reason.

Which brings up the question of how best to use this ability of mine, this “mode”. I know that it’s a rare and powerful gift and could be used in many ways to both give myself a job and a place in the world and fulfill my deep and desperate desire to help people.

Writing a self-help book springs to mind, and then to parlay that into a career as a public speaker. I could help a lot of people that way. All around me, I see people bound by chains of their own devising. I could help set them free.

Or I could be a political commentator. I have all the necessary skills. I have no idea how to get people to start listening to me, but I am sure I could cook up some insane stunt.

Were I have a religious bent, I would become a preacher. And/or cult leader. I am pretty sure that once I have people hanging on my every word, the temptation to use that power for my own gratification would be too much for me to bear.

And I am sure there are many other applications for my powers.

But all of that has to wait for me to become sane enough to try.

And god damn, am I sick of that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s topic : my butthole.

Just kidding. I won’t go there…yet.

Lets just say it’s very hungry.

Anyhow, the hole I meant to talk about was the deep dark hole inside me that I hide from the world in and yet constantly try to escape.

Obviously, these factors conflict.

View from another angle, this deep dark hole is the one I just crawled out of, the one that I fall into when I sleep. The one I have to climb out of just to wake up.

Today’s journey is especially rough. my sleep apnea must have been extra bad last night. The heat probably makes it worse.

It sure doesn’t help, that’s for sure.

At least I have stopped taking the Trazodone, for the most part. Once I realized I could sleep fine without it and that, if I did, waking up was not nearly so hard, out it went.

I can’t help but notice from the Wiki article that it is primarily an antidepressant and/or anti-anxiety medication. Interesting. It is also indicated for insomnia, so using it for sleep is not some kind of crazy off-list use or anything.

And it makes sense to use it on a patient who has a history of depression anyway, so it can’t hurt. And it beats the hell out of the more traditional and very addictive kinds of sleeping pill. Fuck THOSE.

The last thing I need is to add a drug addiction to my list of woes.

As patient readers know, I have a great fear of addiction. That’s because I know, down to my core, without a shadow of a doubt, that I am a prime candidate for it.

Give me something that lets me escape myself and my bad emotions for a while and I will become addicted to it almost immediately.

That’s what happened with Skyrim, and it’s just a fucking video game.

Speaking of video games, that’s my main addiction right now, and that’s because it provides that escape that I crave. When I am wrapped up in playing a video game, time passes easily and I don’t feel worthless or directionless or lost. I don’t feel like I am dying inside. I don’t feel like I am toxic.

In fact, I don’t feel myself (or my self) at all. I am in “the zone'” and un-selfconscious. The games I play and like are the ones that can keep my massive mighty mind occupied. That keeps it from turning on itself.

I guess you could say it keeps my inner demons too busy to torment me.

It would be so nice if I could get the same thing from something productive. And it seems possible on the surface of it, but it isn’t.

Why? Because in order for an actyivity to be productive, it has to have some kind of real-world use, and once the real world is involved, it’s not an escape any more.

In fact, it becomes the opposite of an escape because it makes me feel a lot worse, not better. All kinds of fear of my own flailing inadequacy and morbid uselessness and my fear of the negative judgment of others come into play, I begin to feel exposed and that makes me feel anxious and desperate, the nightmare of infinite possibilities begins, and all hell breaks loose.

That’s the kind of shit lurking in my head that I have to deal with every waking moment of my life. It’s not wonder I need to escape it.

Even though I know that escaping only makes things worse. I wouldn’t have all these demons in my head if I just stayed out of my deep dark hole long enough to deal with them and thus be rid of them.

Escaping is a lot easier, though. And I am all about the easy, more’s the pity.

I feel like there are a lot of people who are addicted to the path of least resistance, like me. People who always take the easy way out regardless of what is in their own best interest. People trapped by their own total lack of self-discipline.

People who waste away in lives they hate because they can’t bring themselves to willingly face, endure, and fight their problems. So much easier to avoid them through one’s chosen forms of escape.

There’s that word again. Easy. I’m beginning to hate that word.

In a way I always have because school was always far too easy for me. Even when I went to university, classes were too easy for me. The subject matter was more interesting, and exams took a lot out of me, but at no point did I feel challenged and forced to up my game.

So I never had to learn self-discipline. You don’t need it when you can ace the test without studying. Without even remembering that there was a test that day.

That must seem so unfair to others. I know it seemed unfair to my poor brother when we were in the same courses at UPEI. He would sweat bullets studying like hell for an exam, including last minute cramming, and I would waltz in with zero preparation and get a higher mark than him.

Well, the joke’s on me, bro. you have a life, I do not. I might have gotten the big brains but you have always been fare more sane, competent, and socially integrated than I could ever hope to be.

I’m not saying  that I would swap.

But I am jealous nontheless.

Fuck this heat. It’s making me even more nonleaner than usual.

I feel hunted right now. Too much escaping, I suppose. Fleeing in all directions at once. I would fele better if I could just calm down, slow down, and sort through my thoughts, but I can’t.

Not until I wear myself out, I guess. And I do that through playing video games, and otherwise occupying my mighty mind.

They are not just my hobby, they are my exercise wheel where I can run and run and run while safely not getting anywhere.

And they are killing me,.

I will talk to yoiu nice people again tomorrow.

Fair warning, I am going to be talking about the deep workings of my mind tonight and so things make get even more obscure and personal than usual.

Essentially, I have been developing my ability to take the sorts of terrible emotional tensions that plague me and redirect their energies into something more positive.

As patient readers know, I am a very pent up dude who finds it very hard to express his emotions because I hide behind my friendly, funny mask.

Wow, I just summarized months of blog posts.

All that unexpressed emotion build up inside me, and I go through periods where the tension involved in holding back all that emotion gets to be more than I can suppress, and it spills into my conscious mind and makes me feel like my body is trying to squeeze itself to death from the inside.

It’s very bad.

These attacks been happening to me recently, which is what brought the whole subject to mind. Luckily, this time through, I know exactly what is going on and I know that there is no point in trying to fight back because that just makes things even more tense.

It’s like, dude, it’s jammed. Trying to force it through just makes it jam harder. The only way out is to relax and find another outlet for the energy.

That’s the step I am on right now. And I am cautiously optimistic.

Because I can feel it now. This redirection. It’s not an abstract idea or an untestable conceit. It’s a real capacity that operates on my deepest emotional level.

I can feel emotional energy being allowed to build then being released  into some other, superficially unrelated thing in order to take the tension out of the jammed up emotional conduit so the jam can clear and things can run smoothly for a change.

I am pretty sure this must be how healthier people deal with life. They have the capacity to find expression for their emotions by the simple expedient of acting on them.

And not just on them, from them. They don’t feel like doing something for a purely emotional reason is inherently wrong, like emotionally constipated intellectuals like myself do. They don’t freeze emotions out of the equation entirely and try to make all decisions, even extremely personal ones,. from some kind of detached and impersonal point of view, like I do.

They don’t feel like doing something purely out of unrestrained emotion, without a single logical thought involved, would be the most embarrassing and shameful thing ever.

Well, what is more of nightmare to the emotionally constipated than its opposite, emotional incontinence?  The very idea of it happening around others fills me with a terrible sense of shame and failure and being bad.

This attitude is clearly untenable. I submit my entire life as evidence. Nothing human can survive that level of repression. Even just contemplating it in the abstract, as I am doing now, fills me with a feeling of wrongness and alienation.

So clearly, this redirection is desperately needed.

Hey, I found my way back to the point! (SFX : Ragged cheer)

And if suffering these attacks of tension are what it takes for me to learn this fundamental coping mechanism, so be it. Bring it on. Something has to clear out that emotional traffic jam blogging up my emotional coping resources.

And odds are, whatever does that is going to hurt. But fuck it. It’s only pain. Pain passes. It happens then it’s over and you are left with what it got you.

I will gladly suffer ten kinds of hell in order to be sane, and be able to have a normal adult life instead of being a brain in a diaper.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet…

I keep having to pause the blogging in order to process the emotions that are coming up. This is a very good sign.

Now where was I? Oh right, competent adulthood. Dreams thereof.

As you know, I feel an enormous amount of very deep shame about how I have never had anything even remotely like an adult life. I have lived my entire life dependent on others. The biggest progress I ever made was to shift to being dependant on the govrernment of BC instead of my friends.

Kinda sad, ain’t it?

I’ve never supported myself financially. I have mever had a real jb with which to support myself financially. I have no employment history, which is kind of a big deal if you hope to ever, ever, ever get hired for anything, especially when you are 45.

You see why I can’t do job interviews? Why the very idea makes me feel like I am shriveling and shrinking down to the size of a peanut?

Shelled, of course.

And I have never been in an relationship. That is even weirder than the job thing. There are total losers out there who are even even worse staights than myself when it comes to almost anything yet they have been through five or six relationships by my age.

Possibly really bad ones. It’s hard to find love when you’re broken. But they had them.

The fact that I have not testifies to just how alienated from my instincts and drives I am. Other people seek mates because they are driven by very deep social instincts that override any caution or restraint the conscious logical mind tried to impose.

But not I. I must have my precious, precious safety and the comforting illusion of logic. I have to keep myself ridiculously understimulated on the physical level because God knows, I can’t let myself get “out of control”.

Sometimes I wih I lived in the world of the John Varley short story Overdrawn At The Memory Bank, where when you are overstressed, you can get your consciousness transferred into the body of an animal for a while.

I think spending a weekend as a ofx would do wonders for me.

Only problem is, I wouldn’t want to come back!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I thought about calling this blog the Daily Download at one point. But now I dunno. People might think it has something to do with actual downloads.  Like every day I am going to recommend a cool game or app for people to try.

I also considered calling it the Daily Dump, but there are so many things wrong with that idea that its wrongness could not be graphed in Euclidean space.

I could call it The Release Valve, I suppose, but that would make it sound like it’s where I vent my spleen. And that’s not what this blog is about.

Most of the time, anyhow.

And I would hate to get pigeonholed as a pigeon as a “ranter”. This blog is for whatever I feel like expressing that day. And I mighty not feel ranty at all.

I’m a complicated man. And no one understands me. Period.

I have also considered various names involving the word “dreaming”. Long Night’s Dreaming, Daily Dreaming, 1000 Dreams, and so on.

For someone like me, who is in and out of bed all day and for whom bed is never more than a foot away, the line between reality and dreams can get mighty fine. Not to the point where I can’t tell the difference – mostly – but definitely to the point where even when I am here typing away to you nice people, I feel like I am partially asleep.

And the dream world feels like it’s half a blink away.

It’s been particularly bed lately, and that’s all my fault, because I have fallen back into the habit of not bothering to get dressed if I am not going out.

My feeble excuse is the heat. But that is nowhere near enough to justify doing something I know is bad for me – spending all day naked – just because it’s easier.

It’s that fucking path of least resistance again. It’s so tempting for a formless water person like myself. It’s holding onto my form and steering my own destiny and especially driving towards a goal even when the initial impulse is gone that is hard.

Then again, I did write a million words in eleven months once. That involved sticking to a goal. In that case, the sheer audacity of the goal motivated me.

It was a lunatic thing to do and I loved that.

But my depression can’t be fooled like that again. I have tried to come up with another crazy ass goal to motivate myself again, but the forces of destruction and dissolution within me that attack and destroy any source of motivation or really any structure within myself at all quickly tear it apart into its constituent elementary particles.

These forces are very powerful and are one of the prime reasons I can’t get anywhere in life. They destroy my motivation and make it pointless to truly plan things because those plans won’t last five minutes in the pirahna pit of my mind.

So all I can do is think about stuff that might work if I could actually do it and pretend I am totally going to do these things any day now and try to survive.

But it’s all lies. I’m not going anywhere. I am going to die young without having spent one heartbeat as an actual adult.

Hell, without even making it to my teen years, emotionally speaking.

And all because of the predators within.

What is the deal with them, anyway? Why is my inner environment like the surface of Venus – far too much heat, acidity, and pressure for anything to remain alive for more than a few incredibly painful moments? What is ripping everything apart?

A bunch of things, I think.

1. Maintaining the status quo. There’s the part of the mind that resists change in order to maintain mental stability. But that’s mot enough on its own. That’s clearly been hijacked by my mental illness, like a virus invading a healthy cell and getting it to produce more of the virus.
2. There is also all that anger.  I think these attacks on myself are a way to vent anger on myself as well. I have so much rage in me and vastly insufficient means of expressing it, so my mind seizes on anything “foreign” and rips it apart like a pack of wild dogs. Hungry ones.
3. The need to remain liquid.  There’s also that thing about not wanted to be caught in the wrong shape that I have talked about before. It’s an obsession that equates adaptability with safety. Ergo, anything which restricts the kinds of forms I can take at any moment has to go. That makes permanent structure impossible.
4. Hiding deep dark truths.  Because of my reflective and analytical nature and my sky high IQ, my subconscious mind has to work very hard to keep things hidden from me. I feel like this involves a very complex shell game being played in the deep layers of my mind. One that, like a magic trick, relies on distraction and motion to keep me from knowing where the badness is hidden, or even that there is anything hidden at all.
5. Feeding the beast.  The beast, in this case, being my creative process. On a fundamental level, way down deep, my creativity involves dissolving things into their constituent elements and then using those elements to make new things. Kind of like a Star Trek replicator. In my case, though, the new things also get dissolved and few thigns actually make it through that process.
6. Maximizing free space for the contemplation of big ideas.  And the big picture. And so forth.

And no doubt countless other factors as well.

It’s hard for me to imagine life without this internal predation. The very idea of being able to build something in my mind and have it just… stay there fills me with a sweaty kind of panic.

But there has to be a way to make my internal ecosystem less toxic.

Guess it’s time to drain the swamp.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I had a really good idea for what I would talk about today. It was something big and important that would require me to really dig deep into my psychological damage and look at it in a way I had never done before and that I really didn’t want to talk about.

That’s how I know I have hit psychological paydirt. When I feel that fearful “I don’t want to go there” resistance. That’s a sure sign that I have found something  big.

And I then, of course, steer right towards it. There’s benefits to being psychologically strange and the ability to make a choice like that is one of them.

I don’t resist therapy. I don’t shy away from the really deep bad stuff.  I know from experience that growth does not come without catching up on one’s delayed suffering. .I am perfectly willing to pay the price.

This is a rather bizarre outlook, I would imagine. Most people are nowhere near as self-aware and reflective and in tune with psychology as me. On that level, I am a far easier patient to deal with than many others.

On the other hand, my issues are products of my extraordinary mind and you have to be pretty on the ball to keep up with me.

So it probably evens out.

It would suck to have a therapist who could not keep up and needed everything explained to them. In fact, I would simply stop going. That kind of therapist would be worse than useless to me. I would have to request someone new.

Luckily, Doctor Costin can keep up with me even when I am going pretty fast compared to how slow I go for average people.

It’s nowhere near my top speed. I have never gone my top speed. Nothing in my life has ever demanded it and I am way too scared to experiment with it on my own.

That’s the sort of thing that could destroy my sanity if I was not careful. What sanity I have is held together by chicken wire and good intentions anyway. I sure as hell don’t want to test that shit at high speeds.

Anyhow. Where was I? Oh right.

I had a great idea then I forgot it. So what else is new/

It’s like my mind is a fast-flowing river and the things I forget are the things that get washed away by it. If I truly want to remember something, I have to slow everything down and make a specific and concentrated effort to store it, and then bring everything back to full power again.

And I hate doing that, which is why I am so reluctant to do it, and end up not doing it even when I should. It feels weird and unnatural and wrong and as we all know from my comments about the prospect of a dumb therapist. I hate to slow down for anything.

I have always been running on a much faster CPU than most people. I have had to patiently wait for everyone else to catch up since my first day of school.

Remember, I was the kid who did his classwork in like two minutes then spent the rest of the class bored out of his mind. I also had to sit there while the teacher explained for the third time something I understood the first time.

Lectures can be excrutiating for me for just that reason. I realized when going to Kwantlen that the main reason I ask a lot of questions in class and have a tendency to dominate class discussions that I have to fight again is that asking questions keeps me from being bored. It keeps me engaged in the class and ups the mental stimulation level of the class for me.

Of course, everyone else wishes I would STFU already.

So a lot of the time when I was attending lectures, even at VFS, I was thinking “Get on with it already! Get to the new information! I got it the first time!”.

Like I have said before, it’s kind of like I have ADHD, but only the mental part of it.

Or, to put it in a less medically offensive way, I have a super fast mind and traditional education methods simply provide the information fast enough to keep up.

It’s like I am always at the DMV from Zootopia :

Luckily, I have friends who can keep up with me just fine. I don’t have to slow down for them apart from the amount I slow down for everyone so that I don’t end up sounding like a babbling lunatic like the kid from the coffee scene in Iron Giant.

I honestly can’t imagine what it would be like to truly run at top speed. Like I said above, all I see in my head is me turning into a babbling lunatic because no matter how fast the mind goes, the rest of the brain has to be able to keep up or everything goes screwy.

Hmmm. That might explain a lot of my problems, come to think of it.

There have certainly been times ibn my life when mental stimulation and excitement have boosted my brain speed to such a high level that when I finally stop, I get a very sharp dose of that “strapped to the front of a runaway train” feeling.

Oh, what the hell.

Like that, only at 3X speed.

And that is scary as hell. In fact, it feels like that runaway train just ran right off of a cliff and I am in the moments before gravity overcomes its forward momentum.

In a cartoon, it would be that moment when the character is hanging in midair because they ran off the edge of a cliff and only just remembered gravity.

I dream, though, of a job that could absorb everything I cna throw at it and really put all this mental muscle of mine to good use.

Maybe then, I could sleep better at night.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wonder what it’s like to think clearly.

As patient readers know, I live my life in a mental fog. It varies in thickness and obscurity, but it’s always there. To get any thinking done, I have to push against it. As a consequence, every little thought has to push through some resistance just to be thought. This is especially true, of course, for complex thought. Especially if it involves heavy use my executive function. ^[1]

This fog is the main reason I am so absentminded and clueless despite my stratospheric IQ. Things I should remember and things I should be aware of in my environment get lost in the fog, and I end up fogging things up.

Ha ha ha.

And the fog is always crowding in, taking over whatever parts of my mind it can, trying to crowd me out of my own headspace. My greatest fear is that one day it will win, and I will be lost in the fog of my own mind forever, unable to find my way back to the real world and helpless against my inner demons.

But in a strange way, I think it has also made me mentally stronger. All that pushing against resistance is like calisthenics for the mind. Add in my unslakeable thirst for mental exercise and it’s no wonder I have such powerful mental muscles.

It’s also what makes my mind such a restless wanderer, always looking for answers and insights. Those lovely moments of clarity when I figure something out are so precious to me because they make me feel like I am seeing clearly, if only for a moment.

As a result, while my outer vision is quite terrible, my inner vision – that inner sight that brings insights – is quite powerful and well-developed. I suppose when you live in a fog you have to learn to make the most of what you can see. And that involves collating and integrating everything you know.

I have talked before aboyt how it’s like the contents of my mind are under constant pressure to assume the smallest shape they can. When I have my insights, it’s like things suddenly fitting together and that mass of info in my mind gets smaller, which feels absolutely sublime.

Call it the Philosopher’s High.

And it just occurred to me that I actually have had times of relative mental clarity. Times when the fog was gone and I was pretty healthy and I felt like I could, at last, really face the world as it was.

They scared the crap out of me.

They also felt good. Exhilirating, even. But the feeling of exposure was profound. That old “naked in the tundra” feeling, or perhaps “naked in the Serengeti” would be more apt because it made me feel like I was surrounded by predators on an open field with no cover and way too many directions danger can come from.

So that fog is there for a reason. It keps me from seeing too much of reality for me to endure and remain calm. It might be a burden but it’s also a security blanket, a suit of armor, and the anesthetic I use to cope with the pain of life.

Of course, my life would be a lot less painful without it. Assuming I could get used to the higher physical stimulation levels without succumbing to panicked mania this time.

It’s really a remarkable feeling. Like being strapped to the hood of an out of control train. You’re enjoying it and scared out of your wits at the same time.

Hmmm. This buggering off shortly after I get to 600 words is becoming a habit.

So essentially, the fog = my depression. Or at least, that’s how I currently concieve of it. As much as I might rail against it, it is not going to go away any time soon because I still need it. I need its numbing effect and its cooling touch and above all, its ability to keep me from being overstimulated into terror by the real world.

Until I overcome those problems, this icy fog of mine will cling to me like a foul smelling glue. And as long as it is there, I will never achieve the mental clarity I have sought for as long as I have been familiar with the concept.

And no wonder, given what I was working with.

The source of the fog is obvious. My primary trauma – being raped by a stranger at the age of four. When I took my mind away and never truly came back to reality – not fully – it was this fog of mine that kept me on ice and kept those traumatic memories on ice for all these years.

I am picturing the fog as the sort that flows out of a canister of liquid CO2 when you open it now. Cold and deadly and very dangerous.

But also very, very cool.

Ba dum tish.

Of course, starting from that prime trauma, the fog become very good at simply locking bad memories and emotions away, so that subjectively, it felt like I was making those emotions disappear forever.

Not possible, of course. The only way to get rid of an emotion is to express it. Everything else just delays the process and drags your suffering out further.

Mostg of us are walking around with a huge burden of unresolved emotions. For most people. it’s not a heavy enough burden to make them ill.

That’s because, lacking the mental resources of the truly intelligent, they have no choice but to actually feel their emotions and act on them, in realtime.

Luckily, I am far too smart fvor that kind oif weak and feebleminded sanity.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I dune messed up again, mother. It’s official. Your son is a goof.

Got up a bit before noon and got in the cab to go to therapy around 12:15. Got to therapy at around :12:40. Late, but not too late. Or so I thought.

Got there and asked the receptionist if the doc had been asking about me yet. She said no, and in fact he was not in the office yet.

Uh oh. Here comes that sinking feeling.

So I sit to wait, and the sinking feeling increases because a little voice in the back of my head is saying that my appointment was actually yesterday.

Oh sure, NOW you tell me. Where were you yesterday, when I had plenty of time and it would have been no problem to go to therapy then come home and relax?

So I asked the receptionist to call Doctor Costin, my shrink. He did not pick up. The receptionist said she didn’t think he was coming i today at all.

So ayup. It was yesterday. And he told me last time. But I forgot.

Now normally at this point, I would simply take the cab home again. But on the way in, I had noticed that it was a specacularly perfect summer day today, so after dithering about it for a little while, I decided I would walk to the bus stop four blocks away and take the bus home instead.

After all, the cringing scuttling weak voice inside me that would lead me to take the cab is exacftly the voice I am doing my best to kill.

Fuck you, pussy. I’m moving up and moving on. You are not me. I can be better.

So I walked. And it was truly gorgeous out. Skies a cloudless blue. warn golden sunshine on the lush green grass, the smell of hot pavement and singed soil bring back pleasant childhood memories of a time when an afternoon lasted forever and happiness was a lime green popsicle and a bag of penny candy.

Remember penny candy?

One small flaw in my plan : on my rush out the door, I grabbed my one long-sleeved T-shirt, and it was uncomfortably thermally efficient. Ideally I would have been wearing something breezier. But it was still very nice out.

Then I discovered that the buses that stop near my apartment don’t stop at the stop in question any more. Or if they do, it’s not listed at the stop any more. So after watching a few 410 buses go by, I got on the next one and it took me to the Skytrain stop a few blocks from here. And I walked home from there.

Standing room only on the bus, which sucked. But it wasn’t like when I was going to VFS and I couldn’t get a seat. That meant 25 minutes jammed together like sardines with no chance to sit and relieve the swelloing in my feet.

This was ten minutes tops,. and so it didn’t get anywhere near the excrutiating stage.

A couple of times during the walking portion of my journey, I sat down to rest. After all, I was in no rush any more and the weather was amazing, and I only overheat when I am moving. If I can sit still, I can adjust to anything.

Hence my love of lying on the beach despite being so prone to heat stroke. As long as I am lying still or at the very least not doing very much, and stay hydrated, I can just lie there and let the heat bake the toxins out of my skin.

Like a sauna. But with better scenery.

Well, it’s time for me to try for an afternoon nap despite the fan on my bed having died. Wish me luck.

Well, I have a few minutes before heading off to a Paragon meeting at the Hackery, so I might as well blog.

Lately, I have been re-examining the idea of take the parking brake off my writing and pretending every month is National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo. pronounced “Nano ree mo”.) and just spending all day writing.

This idea was brought back into my mind by this video :

It’s about a fascinating fellow named Henry Darger. He spent his whole life working meni;l hospital jobs and spent all his free time writing and drawing these gradiose stories about super-perfect grils who fight evil and corruption in a great war with an evil empire, to varying success.

My theory as to the rampant nudity : to him, nudity meant purity. That’s not a new idea. Nude children have represented purity since medieval times. The image of very young and therefore not yet knowing of nudity as sin (as if they lived in Eden before the apple) children was considered especially potent.

That’s is – seriously – what all the cherubim and seraphim was all about.

At first, anyway.

As to why the random simple penises and testicles, I think the dullest answer is the most likely : he had no idea what girls had between their legs. None.

I mean, he was raised in stricti Catholicism. When would he have found out?

Anyhow, Henry’s example got me to thinking about him and his world. It didn’t matter to him that his jobs were so lowly because when the shift was over, he went back to his “real world”,. where he God AND a mighty general.

And yes, that’s definitely less than sane. Bit I can’t help but love it. I connect with it on a deep level, and truly think that there but for the grace of God and the less than total social isolation in my childhood go I.

And the idea of spending all my time creating has a certain appeal. Unlike Henry, I would show it to the world, but knowing me, I wouildn’t do it well.

Or much at all,. really.

I mean, the writing part of it is more or less what I did last November with my sprawling crazy novel. I wrote what I wanted to write. I stitched it together into a shared universe. In said universe, I could do what I want, which turned out to be writing about a gay romance between a man and a male cartoon bunny.

Seems obvious in retrospect.

And I admit, I am curious ot see what I could get out of doing a hell of a lot more writing on a psychological level. The more I write, the more of my hidden glacier of emotion gets melted and released. Writing a lot more might be the key to speeding up that process so that I might be sane before I die.

That’s the dream!

SO I will ponder some way of giving myself permission to write like a bastard every chance that I get, and hopefully. have that replace my video game addiction.

At least writing is creatively fulfilling.

And I am getting very very tired of wasting my time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.