So there I was, standing there, urinating, and wondering what I would write about in that unfocused, consulting the inner voice kind of way familiar to most creatives.

As my mind wandered, I found myself thinking about how my room is a total disaster area that always makes me kind of sad when I think about it.

Then a radical thought hit me : I could change that.

I could clean it up. Then it wouldn’t make me so sad any more. I have the power to actually make my life better. I could totally do it.

This might not seem like much of revelation to you, and I understand that. Intellectually, it’s a no-brainer. ObviouslyI could clean up. My limbs work. I know the procedures involved. I have the necessary skills and knowledge to tell the difference betweeen dirty and clean. I can organize stuff.

Then again, that’s true of several dozen infinities of things that are simple, sane, logical, obvious, doable, and easy that would no doubt make my life a lot better, and I don’t do any of those, either.

Clearly, then, this is about the emotional component of ability. Everything else needed to tidy up is present but heretofore, the emotional component has been missing.

Because despite knowing that, on paper, I am capable of doing all these things. it never felt like I could. Like, at all.

That’s how bad my passivity and my sense of a total lack of legitimacy and agency has gone. Actually doing things seems impossible. The fear that grips me won’t allow it. To actually do things is to step outside that very, very small comfort zone in which I can be calm and escape the icy clutches of my pervasive anxiety.

Even just thinking about actually getting up and cleaning my room gives me the feeling that an icy hand is clutching my heart and threatens to do far worse if I don’t comply with its demands and cease contemplating action.

I am, as always, and at all times, my own hostage.

This cold hand wrapped around my heart is the main enforcement mechanism of my depression slash anxiety. It’s the villain lurking in the shadows with the gun pointed at my head making me say to the person on the other end of a phonecall that “No, I can’t do that. No, I can’t explain why. I know that’s not good enough. I have no choice. ”

Well the secret is out now. There’s a madman holding me hostage and his name is me. Call 911 and tell them to send in a SWAT team becuase this guy’s a fucking lunatic.

And honestly, I am so very over his drama.

It’s not hard for me to trace this extreme paralysis back to its source. When I was a kid, from way back when I was barely up off the floor, nobody would give me any responsibility or even ask something of me because they didn’t have the patience to actually teach me to do things and would just get mad at me if I tried and take the task away from me and do it themselves.

And all the while giving me no path out. I couldn’t do it myself and I shouldn’t be making them do it either. And the fact that I couldn’t do it myself without being taught made me bad or wrong somehow. And there was nothing I could do about that.

It was a no win situation.

So right from the beginning, I got the message that I just plain could not and should not do things. If I try, I will only end up making a big mess that other people will have to clean up and  they will be really mad at me when they do it and I will end up far worse off than if I had never even tried.

Oh, but I shouldn’t ask someone else to do it either. The very idea will be met with the kind of outraged incredulity normally reserved for daughter’s boyfriends asking their girlfriend’s father if they can bang their daughters right now, on the kitchen table, during Sunday dinner with the vicar.

Becuase it’s not merely rejection. It’s the kind of rejection that heavily implies that there must be something fundamentally and seriously wrong with you for even thinking of the question, let alone actually asking it.

Obviously, if you can’t do it and you can’t ask anyone else to do it for you, you can’t have it. You totally lack agency in the world.

I couldn’t even pray that someone would do it without asking.

And those are the bad tapes that play when I want to go outside my tiny tiny safety zone. Don’t do it. You will only end up screwing it up and making things worse. You can only ever be worse off for trying. Be quiet and stay out of everybody’s way.

In fact, could you be a dear and stop existing? We never wanted you in the first place and there is absolutely no room for you because to give you a share would mean less for us, and why should we give up anything for someone as worthless and broken and utterly unwanted as you?

You should be grateful we even let you stay around.

All of this (and my, there’s a lot of this) is to explain why the idea that I actually, truly, really can change my world to be more to my liking is such a radical thought.

I have known that I am capable of many things for a long, long time. After all, I was the kid with the crazy amount of potential who everyone said would make it big one day.

You know. Probably. Or whatever.

But as I have said many times in this space, there is a huge difference between knowing something and believing it.

Knowledge is a thought,.

Belief is an emotion.

And knowledge ain’t worth shit if you don’t believe it.

I will talki to you nice people again tomorrow.

My sleeping pill, that is. Good ol’ trazodone.

My relatiobnship with it has become more nuanced and complex lately. It used to be that I took it before going to bed no matter what.

Now I take it on an as-needed basis.

The change started when I lay down to relax and read one night and ended up falling asleep for four hours or so, without taking the pill.

Interesting, but that’s all. The pill has always done little to help me get to sleep, it just helped me stay asleep. Before I started taking it, I was lucky to get two hours of sleep before I woke up and had to get up for a while till I calmed down from whatever night terror had awoken me.

Probably a reaction to my sleep apnea, that.

With the pill, I could get four to five hours of sleep in a row and that was a big help.

So when I fell asleep and got that same amount of sleep sans medication, I was surprised and pleased.

More importantly, though, I woke up feeling fine. Let me repeat that. I actually woke up feelinjg rested and relaxed.

That’s very big news chez moi,. Normally I wake up feeling like day old crap and it takes me over an hour to fully wake up. And sometimes, I don’t make it, and end up having to go back to bed.

That’s how I feel right now. Patient readers know the drill. I feel sleepy and dizzy and dragged down and kind of like I have been squashed flat and now I am slowly re-inflating to full three dimensional status.

Oh. And I feel lightly bruised all over.

For many years, I thought this was entirely due to my sleep apnea. But due to the incident in question, I have been questioning that assumption, and that led me to try a night without the pill.

And that was fine. I got to sleep fine and slept for almost as long as with the pill, and found waking up far easier to do. And so I made the switch.

I only take the damned pill when I am having a lot of trouble getting to sleep. Generally, that means I have had one of my goddamned attacks of being perfectly sleepy then suddenly being wide awake and tense and anxious and unable to sleep at all.

That happened last night. hence me ffeling like used crap right now. When I hit 500 words, I am going to go back to bed, at least for a little bit, so I can get my second wind and finish the damned thing.

I might end up getting another couple of hours of naptime, or the liter of diet cola I am drinking might finally kick in and I more or less bounce back out of bed and am actually able to think and act and get shit done.

I am hoping for the latter, naturally.  I would rather be wakeful. It’s so very frustrating to want to be awake and alert and enjoying life but you can’t because this goddamned heavy sleepiness makes it impossible to concentrate or even function properly.

That’s when I turn into a little kid who protests going to bed and claims he is not sleepy even though his eyes are heavy and he has been napping on and off for a while.

Well, not really. I used to do that but I am more philosophical about the whole thing now. I still feel that way and I have the urge to try to do what I want to do through the haze of sleepiness and feeling crappy, but I don’t indulge it because I know it’s futile.

Better to give in to the urge to sleep and see where that goes.

And speaking of which, time to do that myself.

Aaand I am back. Ended up getting another hour or so of sleep. I feel a lot less crappy now. I still don’t feel that great, but at least I feeling marginally human now.

This got me to thinking about my attitude towards my own illness. It remains tortuously complex. On a deep level, I still can’t accept that my illness keeps me from doing what I want to do and that I need to take that into account when judging myself.

It’s that thing I call my ambition rearing its ugly head again. I burn with ambition and want so badly to go out into the world and strut my stuff and show the world what I can do, given the chance, and to finally make a life for myself instead of my current pitiful and entirely unsatisfying existence.

There I go again! Yes, my life is very unfulfilling right now, but heaping corn on it does not help and only ends up making me feel worse and even less likely to get anything done and even more likely to cling to my video games as a safe escape.

And yetm these energies cannot be denied. They have to go somewhere. And with my path to action blocked by my physical and mental infirmities, they have no outlet.

And it’s driving me crazy.

I feel so goddamned frustrated sometimes that I want to go on a rampage of violence and destruction just to get some god damned relief.

Instead, I wait. I wait for the day when the frustration overwhelms the resistance and blows the doors wide open for me and lets me finally step out into the light.

But in the meantime, it would be nice if I couild find my way towards not taking the frustrations out on myself. That means I have to forgive myself for being sick, and that is not an easy thing to to do.

Why? I am not sure. Hating onself for being sick is blatantly unfair and highly illogical. Hate the illness, sure. But being sick is no reflection on one’s worth or character.

But I just can’t help myself.

I am too damned sick to stop doing it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight’s entry will probably piss some people off something fierce.

To those people, I apologize.  But ask yourself : why are you so mad?

In a way,. it will be a continuation of my line of thinking about people not being willing to invest any effort or time in things they say they care about, but with a twist.

Basically, what I’ve been pondering today is what I will call the ‘passive reflex’ but which probably deserves a way better name than that.

It has to do with how we respond to life’s challenges. The active reflex says either attack the problem or flee it, but DO SOMETHING, DAMMIT.

The pasisve reflex says either hide or go limp, but above all, DO NOTHING.

Both have their drawbacks. There’s many people beating their head against the wall over and over again because of their inability or unwillingness to do nothing, or rather, to stop, examine their situation, think about it, and then take intelligent action.

But what I want to talk about tonight is the passive reflex because it’s what makes people give up on things.

That’s not that bad in and of itself, but a lot of the time, the thing they are giving up on is themselves. Their hopes, their dreams, their drives, their desires.

And all to avoid what seems like extremely trivial challenges. So what gives?

For one thing, as I have said in this space before, failure can become addictive. The active portion of the addiction is relief. When you give up in the face of a challenge, you go from stressed to relaxed and ‘free’ in a heartbeat and that sudden release of tension can feel very good. Practically euphoric.

The failure addicted is hooked on that little high. And in order to ensure their supply, their develop a pattern of rapidly escalating tension and fear and anxiety so that the moment of sweet release that resolves the situation without requiring any actual action be taken happens as soon in the process as possible.

In essence, you freak out because it works.

It works because it gets you out of the situation rapidly and rewards you for doing so.

The mind then, as a matter of course, justifies this action after the fact, and it’s this process of justification that I am pondering today.

When people bash millennials, you often hear tales of spoiled kids being suddenly surprised and offended by the idea that life expects them to do things they don’t want to do and some of those things are not easy at all.

We have all heard the horror stories from employers who find their new hires have to be slowly and painfully walked through the absolute basics of what it means to work for a living before they can even start the job.

What, you mean I have to come here whenever you want me to for like hours at a time AND do a bunch of stuff I don’t feel like doing just because you say so?

What unspeakable cruelty is this? Why is life so hard? Nobody could do that, it”s IMPOSSIBLE, that’s too hard!

But it isn’t too hard, kids. You’re just not willing to put in the effort it takes. Life is work. Nothing truly good comes without cost. That’s just how life works.

And before you go declaring that to somehow be unfair, remember that it works the exact same way for everybody. So to say it is unfair, you have to believe that things should be different for you and you alone.

And how privileged is that? What makes you so special? And just what do you think it “wrong” with all the people who pay the price for what they want and consider it worth it? What do they have that you don’t?

Life’s not meant to be easy. If everything was easy, life would be boring. And the universe does not owe you an effort and suffering free path to the top.

Look at it this way. Every time you give up on or refuse to even try something related to what you want out of life, you are saying “it’s not worth it. ”

So if you dream of being a famous artist but never get around to actually painting anything, you are saying “this dream of mine is not worth the effort to me. ”

And that’s fine. Maybe it truly isn’t worth it to you and you should seek something else to do with your taelents and energies.

But if that’s true, at least be honest enough with yourself to give up on the dream. You’ve already decided that the price is too high for it to be worth attaining, so really, you are only giving up what you have already rejected.

Why would that hurt?

Or are you waiting around for someone else to make it easy enough for you? Because I have news for you, princess. Nobody is going to do that. If you’re an adult, your time of other people making things super easy for you is over and you have lost your right to give up and then whine about it.

Because who are you whining to? Whining is what children do when they want their parents to come to their aid, and when you do it as an adult, you just look pathetic. There is nobody out there who can take over your life when you get tired or cranky.

You are on your own, and no, that does not mean you have been thrown out into a cold cruel world that expects the imPOSSIBLE from you.

All it asks is that you, ya know, try. And I mean seriously try, not just “he look everybody! I’m trying! See me try? You can’t say I never tried! So you will come to my rescue NOW, right?” type trying.

I mean trying and trying till you get it right type trying.

And if you are not willing to do that, at least admit your dreams mean very little to you and are therefore not worth the effort it would take to achieve them.

And if the idea of giving up on your dreams makes you sad, mad, or upset, then maybe you should reevaluate what you consider to be a price worth paying.

Because the world is full of people with dreams they are unwilling to pay to pursue.

so just by paying the price, you put yourself way ahead of the pack.

Why not parlay that edge into a future?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My lord, did I go off on a tangent yesterday. Let’s try this again.

Life as a liquid is hard because liquids have no inherent structure,. No skeleton. A liquid like me can take any shape but not for very long because maintaining a shape takes a constant input of energy and because the longer we stay in any one shape, the greater the fear that we will be caught in the wrong form and unable to shapeshift to adapt.

Thus, I feel safest when I am in my shapeless liquid state. That way, I am free to take whatever shape I need to take in order to handle what life throws at me.

As life strategies go, it has its setacks.

Like lack of agency. In its liquid state, water takes the shape of its container. No container, no shape. The water has little say in the matter. IF it wants to change shape without having to constantly input energy to maintain the new shape. it has to find a new container in the shape it desires.

And that’s hard to do when fear severely limits your capacity for exploration.

The hardest thing for a goo like me to do is to shape my own container, or as I tend to refer to it in this space, provide my own structure. I’d be a hell of a lot better off if I could do it, but that’s just not in the card for a guy like me.

Or at the very least, it’s something I will need to learn.

I don’t know why I am so scared of being caught in the wrong form. I can always just release my structure and shift to what’s needed. But that takes time and enery and mental effort and the crazed little animal in my head is convinced that means that we must therefore remain without form until the last possible moment.

To continue the animal metaphor, that scared little animal wants to maximize the number of ways it can escape at all times. Only full autonomy without form or commitment can make it feel safe.

And yet…. not.

Because it’s also too paranoid to relax when there are too many possibilities. Every escape route is also an avenue of attack that the mean old world could use to GET it at any second. So it also wants the security of structure.

So what it really wants is a container where it can revert to liquid form and relax because the container will provide the structure it needs to feel safe without the constant input of energy it finds so hard to keep up.

While at the same time haveing infinite escape routes.

And underneath it all, vigilance. Constant, painful, unblinking, paranoid vigilance. Always trying to be the eye that sees in all directions at the same time so that it can always see danger coming and flee in the right direction when it does.

I do a lot of fleeing. In fact, I do so much fleeing that I end up doing nothing at all. To flee in all directions at once is identical to standing stock still, scared of the world, afraid to go in any direction because that might take me closer to some horrible danger.

So instead, I hide from the world. My highly predictable life and constant, unchanging environment provide the container and my inability to hold my shape keeps me there. To change my life would be to change the shape of my container while I am still in it, and that feels incredibly weird and disturbing when I try.

Alternately,. I could build a new container then ooze my way into that. But that requires the confidence in my own ability to make that new container right, and that is a pretty tall order. And I would have to stop clinging to my current one in order to slide into the new one and that is quite the leap of faith.

Because the thing is, once a liquid like me finds a comfy container. we settle in hard. And the longer we stay in that comfy container, the more our will to search for a superior container fades away until escape seems impossible.

Or maybe I just want it to be impossible so I don’t have to face that harsh adult world that expects me to pick a form and stick with it.

Either way, it’s a pickle.

If only I could convince that scared little animal in me that it is safe to come out of its hidey hole now. That nothing but love and comfort and safety await it. In this metaphor, I’m like a domesticated cat that got abandoned and went feral and through painful and terrifying experience learned never to trust the hand of man again.

And at the same time, feels compelled to be cute and appealing and affectionate in order to convince people to take care of it.

No wonder I’m such a psycho.

How I wish I could just relax. For reals. All the way. I never totally relax as thigns are now. Even in my sleep, I am scared. The danger never truly goes away,

And this keeps me from true renewal. If I could fully relax, I could go all the way liquid and truly relax, rest, and renew.

Maybe even be reborn, fresh and new and free of the burdens of the past. Emerge from the fetid rancid stagnant dark into the clean bright beautiful light of dawn.

How I long to be free of my tainted self. To be truly clean. To be the person I was before the rape. The person I was meant to be. The person I was supposed to be.

But water does not know how to purify itself. So every day and in every moment, I am trying to balance my multitudinous toxicities against one another in order to simulate pure waters, at least in terms of pH balance.

I don’t know where to go to get purified.

And I don’t know what its like to be clean.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Story of my life, really.

Right now, I feel sort of in between states. I know that I am making major psychological progress but in the process it’s left me somewhat untethered and unfocused and a little insecure about who and what I am.

That’s fine. It’s what I expected. A barnacle like me can’t move to a new rock without letting go of the old rock, and things might well get far, far worse before they get better.

I might have to spend a lot of time in existential freefall, with nothing to support or define me but my very own self.

Been thinking about myself as water lately. You kinow. that old metaphor. I’ve used it here before. And it matches my Mars in Pisces, astrologically speaking.

Mars is not happy in Pisces. Mars is the sign of what gives you energy, motivation, and drive, and it helps define how you attack a problem or otherwise get things done.

Pisces is the sign of liquid water, and like water, Pisces tends to go with the flow, change to adapt, seek its lowest level, and remain without form.

That is a strange way for ones motivational system to work.

It’s not all bad. It gives me adaptability and the kind of deep sensitivity that lets me understand how truly fragile we all are and how hard it is to be human sometimes and essentially makes me such a deep humanist.

It’s probably also the wellspring of my genius, because it is this shapelessness that let my mind flow into the lock and become the key to unlock the answer to problems.

Probably helps me be mad creative too.

And it’s what makes me such a secular mystic. Yes, you read that right. It’s not an oxymoron. I have the same kinds of deep insights, poetic thoughts, transcendental consciousness, and connection with the hidden and the unseen as any mystic.

I just don’t believe it to be anything outside the operation of my particular brain. I am not align with the energy of the cosmos (though I have felt that way), I possess no special insight to the divine (though I could tell you a few things about it), and I am in no sense access to some kind of bullshit magic that defies the laws of time and space.

You guys know me. I’m a materialist. Things either exist, and therefore follow the laws of time and physics, or do not exist, in which case why are we talking about them?

Nothing gets to cheat.

I came up with the term “secular mystic” as a way to help reconcile these two sides of myself. I have had “mystical” experiences my whole life without declaring them supernatural in origin.

Perhaps being raised outside of religion played a part in that.

For example, I have had strong intuitions for my whole life. Truths suddenly occur to me in a blinding flash of insight. And they come on like a revelation, complete with the very wonderful feeling that things suddenly make a lot more sense.

I swear, an addiction to that feeling is what makes people like me philosophers.

These revelations of mine are quite powerful, and I can totally imagine that were I the product of another era, or a stricti religious upbringing, I might well have been tempted to think they had something to do with God.

Certainly, in the moment, I feel connected to something far greater than myself and the sudden rush of the joy of insight doesn’t seem like it comes from me.

But without a religious or mystical cosmology, and with my understanding of the human mind and how it works, I see the experience for what it is : brain activity.

Specifically, it is the activation of the reward center of the brain by the cognitive center responsible for keeping our body of knowledge as small and therefore fast as possible.

In that moment of insight, a large body of knowledge is suddenly condensed into a solution or principle the “app” that was working on that problem closes and releases all its resources, and the result is a euphoric moment where everything seems simple and clear and easy to understand.

It’s a heady thing. But it ain’t magic.

Similarly, I have had very strong attacks of deja vu for as long as I can remember, though it accelerated during my teen years and on into college.

Brain science to the rescue once more  That’s because during out teens and twenties, the brain is in its final pre-adult stage of development and its systems are growing in complexity by leaps and bounds, and the brain pathways that get used get reinforced far more than in adult brains, and the ones that do not get harshly culled.

Well I find it interesting, dammit.

And these deja vu attacks are powerful.  This is a full brain event. Memory and reality overlap and it really feels like the exact moment I am in has happened before.

And that used to scare the crap out of me. I felt like I was detaching from the normal time stream and that I was going to return to that previous moment and have to live all the same stuff all over again.

Why that is such a terrifying thought, I do not know. I would love to go back in time to a previous point with all I know now.

But in the moment, I am not exactly rational.

OVer time, thankfully, I got over that fear and now I just see the mments as somewhat unsettling but ultimately meaningness brain misfires where the part of my mind that separates memory from the present is briefly disabled.

It’s still a huge thing. A real full-brain neurological event. It often leaves me feeling dizzy and weak. I get goosebumps and all the hair on my body stands up. I get electric feelings in my hands and large muscle groups.. It really feels like Something happened.

But I know it’s just brain stuff.

So I just do my best to recover smoothly from it, and carry on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have has this video open in a tab for ages :

There’s a lot of excellent points in it, and I’ve been meaning to addrress them, but have never gotten around to it until now because there is always something new on mny mind when I sit down to blof tha takes precedence.

But I just woke up and therefore there’s nothing but jack and shit on my mind – and Jack left town. So today’s the day.

I will follow the structure of the piece then make more general comments after.

1. Meritocracy. This is basically the Just World fallacy reworded, and it’s a fallacy that will never die because it’s easy, Assuming that every gets and is getting what they deserve really reduces your need to think because it gives you permission to bypass the entire issue of social justice. You can write off the entire issue of human suffering and social injustice all it takes it making a very easy assumption about the world. So no matter what the dominant religion, economic system, or form of government people are living under, they will think the same thing if they are doing reasonably well. But as the video says, this places a great deal of unnecessary stress, anxiety, and depression which is only compounded by the fact that the more connected we become, the more humanity we are competing with socially according to our social instincts and the higher above us the socially supreme  – famous people – seem.
2. Individualism.  I am definitely a victim of the cult of the special. In my case, it’s because I am keenly aware that I have extraordinary abilities and therefore cannot settle for an ordinary destiny. This is probably not good. But I, like the rest of my generation, was raised with the belief that we could be whatever we wanted if we tried hard enough. But no amount of ambition and industry will turn a snake into an eagle. Big time success is not in the cards for most people. We would be better off if we told kids that it is fine to dream big and follow those dreams, but it is also okay to merely seek to find a career and a niche and an ordinary life. And that doesn’t make you a “loser”. It makes you human. And take it from a disabled person : I know what it is like to look up to normal people and want to be like them, with a real life and a real job and a real family.
3. Secularism. This is a big one for me because of the opening sentence about how without religion and under individualism, we lack a conception of something bigger than our individual selves. That’s exactly true! Bang, nail hit on head. I had never thought of it in quite that way before, but it’s so true. Without a feeling of being part of something bigger and greater than ourselves, we are stuck in an egoist dead end with no idea why we are so unhappy. We nude monkeys need to feel like we are valued part of a strong tribe and an excess of individualism such as we have now blocks that. To the point where it makes people feel bad for even wanting that because we are all supposed to be rugged self-sufficient individuals.
4. Romanticism. I hate the idea that we all have that special perfect someone out there waiting for us. It puts unachievable ideals in people’s heads and tells them that real love is easy, requires no sacrifice or compromise, and that you are free to abandoned any relationship the moment it becomes less than perfect because obviously that person was not “the one” for you. People need to set their sights way, way lower and stop looking for a soulmate and start looking for someone whose company they enjoy enough to get over the rough patches.
5. The media. We all know this story well. The media knows that humans are wired to be more interested in the negative than the positive because in a state of naturte, it is way more important to know where the saber toothed tiger lives than where that nice patch of berries was. So that’s the kid of content they give us. They are, in that sense, only giving us what we want. The solution proposed is laughable though. Nobody will watch the Happy Things newscast because it’s boring. News, unfornately, has to be entertaining before it can be anything else, and emphasizing solutions will simply result in a newscast full of “Here’s a serious problem, but it’s already being solves, so why am I even telling you this?”. The real solution is to educate people on the difference between the news and reality. And remind them that the news shows them what is unusual, not what is typical.
6. Perfectability. What this hints at is one of the most deadly of the “shoulds” that make us miserable – the idea that we ‘should’ be much happier than we are, and that if we are less than blissfully happy at any point, it’s an emergency at best and a horrible personal failure at worst. People are not meant to be happy all the time. All our emotions are valid and necessary and when we attempt to avoid the ones we deem negative, we only end up making ourselves even more miserable.

All of these factors, plus other things I have spoken about in this space, contribute to the spiritual malaise of our day and age. The most obvious manifestation of this malaise is the rise in the number of people with depression like myself, but depression doesn’t always look like depression. It can look like addiction, or domestric abuse, or trolling, or any number of other ways people try to fill the void inside that modern life does not address. The true damage of this disease is massive.

Personally, I think what is needed is a new religion. One that actually fulfills people’s needs and does not burden them with inane guilt or otherwise make them feel bad for being human beings.

Barring that, what people need is to be educated on the limits of individuality and where to look when the “success” shit just is not doing it for them any more.

Maybe I should write a book called “What To Do Now That You Have It All”.

Maybe then I could be someone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Welp, it is 10:39 pm, which means that I have 1 hour and 21 minutes to write this blog entry and still have it technically be one I wrote today.

So it’s time to throw the fllodgates wide open and get that streamn of consciousness flowing. Full steam ahead!

Today was an unusually active day for me. First I had therapy, which I had to get to via cab due to Joe’s eye issues. Costs me $15 each way, but what the hell, what is money for if not to make your life easier?

Therapy went quite well. I talked about a lot of deep painful shoit. I have come to recognize the icy cold feeling I get when I get into my deep stuff – like I am wearing armor made of ice on the inside, and especially around my heart – as not just being a good thing in general but specfifically the feeling of the ice inside me melting.

So I am willing to seek it out now. I want as much of it as I can get. Because while it feels terrible at the time and I general still feel terrible immediately after, once I recover I will feel better than ever for having calved another iceberg from my glacier of pain.

And if enough of that happens, my internal ice age may finally end.

After therapy, I took a cab to my bank so I could cash this month’s check. The teller was either new or just not very confident/competent because there was some small amount of excess hassle involved.

But whatever. Everyone has their off days.

I also found out at that time that a student loan payment had been deducted from my account. Oops. In retrospect, I think I was supposed to tell them I am still on social assistance and therefore still can’t afford such a payment.

Yes, you read that right. Somehow the onus was on me to tell them I am still disabled, as opposed to them just assuming that I still was until they heard otherwise.

So technically, my card and my savings account got cleaned out plus I had to pay a 44 dollar overdraft today. Yikes.

But I know I will be able to get my moolah back. This happened once before. I just have to call them up again and tell them I am still on social assistance and they will refund my money without a hassle.

Stiil, it’s stress that I do not need.

After I cashed my cheque, I went to the nearby White Spot for lunch. I had skipped lunch except for a tiny snack because I knew I was going to do that, and that would have been a perfectly sane decisions were I not diabetic.

As is, by the time I sat down to eat, I was already feeling lightheaded and I was beginning to shake, which is my number one sign that my blood sugar is now dangerously low and I had better eat SOON.

Lunch fixed that. But not ritght away. In retrospect, I would have been better off if I had bought something small and sugary to eat and thus kick off the more complex carbs in my fries and my Caesar chicken wrap.

Kind of like carbo kloading for longer workouts.

But whatever. I had a pleasant lunch despite being alone and having nothing to read. I seem to be slowly developing the ability to simply zone out and be perfectly happy in my thoughts sans stimulation lately.

So I ate, and thought, and watched the world go by from my favorite seat in my favorite White Spot. and was content to simply Be.

One dark cloud over my picnic : they don’t have the comfy high-backed squishy chairs at that White Spot any more. Dammit. That was a large part of what made it my fave. I have strong feelings about comfortable seating and I feel betrayed.

Everything gets worse.

Otherwise, though, I had a good time, and it was a lovely summer day, so I decided to walk home instead of bothering with the bus.

Don’t think me too heroic, though. Home was only like five or six blocks away.

And it was a pleasant walk. It was hot but not miserably so. I soaked up some sunshine and fresh air and felt pretty good when I got home, apart from slightly sore feet and being fairly dehydrated.

Now normally on Thursdays, I blog when I get home from therapy. After all, all the stuff stirred up by therapy is still fairly fresh on my head and that makes it a good time to get some decent quality therapeutic writing done.

Kind of a “working the metal while it’s still hot” thing.

But not today,. It was too goddamned hot. The heat that had not bothered me outside was quite oppressive once I was inside and no longer feeling the summer breeze. It was too hot and I couldn’t think straight and couldn’t concentrate so I said to hell with it and punted the task to now, when it’s good and dark outside,.

No regrets. I made the right call.

Instead, I had a brief and unsatisfying siesta and then ended up playing Secret World Legends in a desultory fashion for a while.

It’s a game my friend Maelkoth is very into and I can see why. It has a modern setting, loads of atmosphere, a truly creepy twist on the real world, pretty decent writing and quite good voice acting, and it has a great spooky mood to the whole thing.

However, compared to my previous fave, Warframe, it’s slow and clumsy and the battle system is a little on the simplistic side and of course, being MMO, it is bogged down by the usual bullshit with a dozen different currencies and hundreds of weapons and dosens of ways to upgrade your shit and so forth and so on, all designed to emotionally manipulate you into parting with your real life actual spendable money.

So I am semi-meh about the whole thing. I will keep playing, partly because part of the game are genuinely interesting, and partly because I want to be able to talk about it intelligently with Maelkoth.

But I can’t say I am in love with it or anything.

Well, that’s my words. I started off to do stream of consciousness then realize that it was actually easier just to write about my day.

Turns out my stream of consciousness is quite organized and competent.

I choose to look at that as a good thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Normally I don’t bring politics into my blog. I prefer to keep divisive things like that out of this space because that’s not what this blog is for.

This blog is for getting what is inside me out, not for putting new things in.

But it just occurred to me that one of the major aims of this blog is to aid in my psychological recovery by giving me a safe space where I can express the emotions that I find so very hard to express in real life.

That includes my fears, anxieties, worries, and sadnesses, and right now most of those things have to do with the situation down south. .

I am terrified by the idea that I might have to watch America die. And not just because Canada is the USA’s conjoined twin.

Things look bad. Not as bad as my more high strung and demonstrative American friends think it is, but brother, it ain’t good.

People are worried about Donald Trump picking Justice Kennedy’s replacement. I am not. That’s not as dire a situation as it seems.

Why? Because the Senate is almost evenly divided. 49 Democrat, 51 Republican. The fact that John Mccain ain’t dead yet makes it practically a tie.  That means that it would take only one defector to force a tie and two to reject a candidate outright. And I don’t think it will be that hard to get a few to switch, depending.

Depending, that is, on who Trump chooses. From the liberal POV, the absolute best choice is someone completely inappropriate.

Preferably someone who is not even a lawyer.

Why? Because that would make it ludicrously easy for Senators to defect. If Trump picked someone like Ted Nugent or Bill O’Reilly, the cacophanous mockery alone would make Senators afraid to vote yes.

And ideally. the process would stretch out for as long a time as possible in order to maximize the odds that one of the super old CONSERVATIVE justices dies and then they have to replace THEM.

Also, I think people have a narrowly false idea of exactly what a Supreme Court justice will and will not do. It is true that, as the final arbiters of the Constitution, they can more or less change all the fundamentals of what it means to be American.

On paper. But the reality is not quite that simple.

For one thing, the Justices worry about their legacy. They do not want their name on decisions that blatantly violate the Constitution. or otherwise will go down in history next to a thick black mark.

There’s also the fact that the Justices have to face other lawyers during their entire time on the Court. When a Supreme Court Justice goes to the club to relax after a hard day’s work, they aren’t hanging out with politicians.

They are hanging out with other lawyers, and if they blatantly violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution, especially if it violates the actual body of the document, pre-Amendment, then they will be bitterly unwelcomed by many they consider friends.

There’s also the fact that, historically, the Supreme Court has been very, very, very reluctant to go against its own precedent. Sadly, that protects Citizens United, but it also protects the rulings on gay marriage and of course, Roe V. Wade.

There is also the fact that Justices are not particularly loyal to they who appoint them. Their obedience tends to last as long as it takes for them to realize that there is nothing the President who appointed them can do to them once they have the job and then the other factors become a lot more important to them.

But the real thing that restrains modern fascism is that they can only get away with making changes that do not have an effect on the lives of everyday people.

So you can fuck with foreigners in the name of immigration and national security all you want. It has no impact on the average person’s day to day life. And you can even get away with picking on a minority that the public either dislikes or simply isn’t conscious of yet, at least for a while.

But the fascist nightmare stuff like government checkpoints all over the place, the ending of due process, or mass arrests at peaceful protests, and ESPECIALLY the brutal treatment of law-abiding citizens – will trigger a backlash of such ferocity that it could end in revolution if the people are not appeased.

So there is a limit to what they can get away with in the long run.

Also remember that the Trump administration is not popular, even among Republicans. Dumb Donnie’s approval rating is down to 28 percent, and like I always say, approval rating is a very conservative metric.

People basically intepret the question as “Would you kick the bum out of office THIS SECOND?”. And that colors the reponse.

So that lonely 28 percent of people who approve of Trump are not all people who actually like him or think he is doing a good job as President.

They are just people who have not completely rejected him yet.

So the tide has already turned against him and what remains of his support is very weak. It could crumble any day now.

Heck, even the creeps on Fox News sound like their heart isn’t in it any more. Excusing the inexcusable 24/7 is clearly taking its toll on them and I can almost hear their nerves being stretched beyond the breaking point.

What I worry about most for America is civil war. If the Trump team makes peaceful revolution impossible, they will make violent revolution inevitable.

Luckily, I don’t think it would be a prolonged conflict. Dumb Donnie might thing he commands the most powerful armed forces in the world, but he does not. They don’t like him at all and are actually empowered to refuse un-Constitutional orders.

Law enforcement doesn’t like him either. So they won’t be his secret police any time soon. And he’s pissed off the intelligence community.

So any conflict, should it come to that, would be swift and decisive.

To sum up,  the whole thing has been weighing on me a lot lately.

I am gklad I got some of it off my chest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’mma lie down now.

I don’t feel so good.

Or, maybe I’m not that nice a guy, part 2.

I have realized that it really comes down to limits. Boundaries. Without some kind of outer limit to my niceness, I can’t set boundaries to protect myself and my interests.

It’s a difficult subject to really get a grip on. Because I am not talking about the more obvious kinds of boundaries. I definitely have those. There are things I will and will not put up with and for the most part, I trust my emotions to tell me when to fight back.

Subject to verification by my reason, of couse. Sigh.

No. what I am talking about is subtler and more existential. I often feel wide open and vulnerable in life. That’s why I used to talk about feeling like the wind blows right through me and used imagery like being naked in the Arctic and such.

I think my abandonment issues play a big role in that. I really was abandoned as a child, emotionally speaking. No friends, no family support, etc et al ad nauseum. And then there was my broken antenna isolating me further and pushing me even deeper into my ice cold tomb.

Quite the double whammy.

Had I been raped when I was older, perhaps I would have retained the strength to react to my abandonment with anger and learned to use that anger to keep the fires of my ambition stoked and propel me into some kind of world conquering type life.

Or at the very least had enough strength to learn to protect myself in a healthy and engaged way instead of simply withdrawing deeper and deeper into myself.

But I was only four when I was raped, and it destroyed me inside.

That has to be the reason I responded how I did. I remember taking my mind away during the rape, like so many victims of sexual assault. I told myself this wasn’t real, this isn’t really happening, and withdrew into my mind in order to survive the trauma.

And, as I have said before, I never really came back. FRom that point on, I did everything from that place in my mind, and therefore I did it rather clumsily and weakly because I was doing it from one or two steps removed from reality.

And that has continued unto this very day. I types this to you from that icy cage within that might be killing me but it keeps the world away from me and makes sure nothing can touch me, EVER, and thus it is doing its job.

It was a shock when I discoered this snarling, crazed, psychotically angry animal screaming NOBODY FUCKING TOUCH ME inside me. I would not have suspected that something so raw and utterly insane seethed at the heart of my crystalline cage.

Remember how I used to talk about being just a scared little animal inside?

Well it turns out that animal isn’t just scared. It’s pissed. It is the cornered rat, desperate and terrified and freaking the fuck out. Fear and rage and tension and agitation level are all completely maxed and the adrenalin taps are all the way open. And it is ready to go full psycho on anyone who even looks like they are moving toward it.

Poor little thing. Like a bear that has stumbled into an outlying suburb, it doesn’t understand anything about where it is or what is happening to it or what all these strange lights and sounds mean and it is thoroughly freaking out.

That’s what happens when you are damaged and abandoned at a very young age. That’s why seemingly normal everyday situations can leave me overwhelmed and panicky and even when I handle them well, it takes a whole lot out of me.

A big part of me is stuck in the panic from being raped so long ago. Therefore the distance between myself and conscious panic is far shorter than in a healthy person.

Thus its status as my primary trauma. It’s the one that made all the others possible. If, in theory, I could open it up and finish processing it, a very large part of my strength and vitality would be returned to me and I would be far better off.

And I am getting there. The further I go along my road to recovery, the closer I get to being able to handle the Big One. These blog entries of mine are getting more and more intimate and I feel like I am clearing the road of debris and obstacles so that when the time comes to finally face the Big One, I will be able to focus on it exclusviely.

Kind of a rambling metaphor, but it gets the job done.

Wow. Once more I veered wildly away from the niceness issue. Well done, psychologicla defenses. You so sneaky!

The key issue, I think, is that I need to modify my self-image to include and accept a limited version of niceness. That would mean giving myself the kind of permission to be unreasonable and emotional that I have been talking about for a while now.

It all boils down to permission to be human.

And that also entails limitations on my sense of my own power and responsibility as well. Part of the curse of the unopposed and/or undefeated life is that I have never discovered the limitations of my abilities and so, be default, I have ended up with a feeling like there aren’t any.

And if I had less of a deep seated sense of responsibility, I might revel in this feeling of unlimited power and go out to conquer the world with my cocktastic awesomeness.

And the irony is, that would attract people who wanted to put me in my place, and God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, one of them might actually succeed, and then I would know the limitations of my power and be able to calm the fuck down some.

But instead, I practice an excess of restrained out of fear of hurting people.  Like Gulliver in Lilliput, a giant amongst pygmies, terrified his slightest motion will kill someone or destroy someone’s home.

I would like to think that there is someone out there who could truly put me in my place. Someone who could not only withstand my full strength (which I have never used on anyone) but who could actually take me on and win.

I mean, I can’t be the smartest and strongest of will of mind and wit person in the world, can I? There’s got to be someone out there who can defeat me.

Maybe I should set up some kind of tournament,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s not what I want to talk about. It’s what I have to talk about. Because this is where I am right now.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me, no matter how much I want to deny it, that my precious, precious niceness is not all there is to me.

I have a long suppressed side of myself that is as cranky and set in his ways as any other Taurus. This is the side of me that wants thing to be a certain way and who has little patience for fools who don’t know whjat they are talking about, or people who can’t tell the difference between ideology and realoity, or people who do not grasp the basic tenets of science, and so forth and so on.

This is a real part of me and it is one I cannot afford to ignore any more. If I am to become a whole and healthy person who can function in society and stop being a burden to others, I am going to need to face the true me, warts and all, and integrate every last but of myself into my self-image.

Now I am not saying that super nice Fruvous is/was some kind of lie. It may not have been the whole truth but it was, and continue to be, a very real part of me.

I really am a super nice guy. I truly beleive that… I have to.

But in order to move on I have to ask myself a question that I loathe even contemplating, let along asking myself, and the question is this :

How much of niceness is real, and how much of it is cowardice?

I feel dirty just typing it.

But it’s a legit question. There is a difference between being a nice bguy and being permanently stuck in a stance of trying to placate the mean old world so that I can trick it into being nice to me.

And I have to face it : some of my niceness is based on fear. Fear based on the feeling that nobody will ever like me for myself and that my only safety lies in using my various skills to make people like me.

That part of me feel like if the show ever stops and those curtains ever close, people will see the real me and I will be just some guy who is kind of gross and not that interesting and is honestly too weird and socially awkward to be worth dealing with.

It has been clear to me since my first days of being Fruvous online that I have an enormous need for affection and approval. My childhood of near-total emotional neglect left me with an insatiable need to be liked and treated kindly and above all, accepted.

Nobody accepted me as a kid.

Nobody wanted me around.

Nobodty even wanted to be reminded I existed.

And all this left me terribly, terribly cold inside. Like so much dead flesh. A world made of scar tissue and novocaine and dirty slushy snow.

This left me with the very deep feeling that I had to make the most of any attention that I did get, and try to extend it as much as possible, and therefore paying attention to me had to be as rewarding as I could make it.

And that was such a high priority that it precluded the expression of any kind of negative emotion for fear that if dealing with me was anything but totally pleasant, people would turn away from me and I would never get any attention again because now, everyone would know what a horribble, pathetic piece of toxic shit I am, and I would never get any love again till (and including) the day I die.

And so, unconciously. I began developing the rather small set of interpersonal skills I had. But the thing is, when your social antenna is broken., you really can;t do a real good job of teaching yourself social skills, let alone developing them.

That’s how the world ends up with freaks like me who have certain areas freakishly overdeveloped and the rest of them practically vestigial.

As I always say, thing grow strange in the dark.

To haul us, like a fishing boat crew hauling in a heavy catch, back to the point, I would say that it is this all-consuming fear of abandonment if I was not 100 percent pleasant to be around that led me to suppress everything inside myself that did not fit into that idealized and unrealistic picture of myself.

The picture in which I am, essentially, infinitely nice. As nice as I can be at all times, without any regard to my own emotional well-being or needs, forever.

That is clearly not sustainable. No real person can be infinitely anything and so for a long long time now I have not been a real person.

In this case, “real person” meaning someone who is being genuinely themselves.

I have been, at best, a lifelike facsimile.

Again, that does not mean that the person people know as Fruvous is not really me. It is totally the real me…. up to a point.

But I achieved this state of seeming spiritual loveliness by artificial means. Instead of transcending petty personal needs, I merely swept them under the rug. Painted them green so they would belnd in with the scenery and I could pretend to be someone who could never truly exist.

That’s why I have been saying that I am not a real person for all these years. It’s how I have felt like a long time but it has taken reaching this stage in my journey for me to truly understand why.

And it can’t go on. I have to learn to look after my own needs and my own emotional health. I can’t keep pretending I have no needs or wants or desires of my own any more. I am a real human being and real human beings are complex.

Accepting, embracing, and integrating all sides of myself, even the non-nice ones, is a huge and bewildering task and one which will no doubt alter how I see the world and therefore change my world completely.

But it has to be done. I have faith in my self-actualization now. I don’t have to know where the road ends to know what direction I should be going in any more.

I can follow this unreasoned voice inside me that only knows what it needs in order to continue to grow and emerge from the shadows withing my soul into the clean bright golden sunshine of the real world.

And when that day comes,. I will be a real person at last.

When that day comes. I will finally br an adult.

When that day comes, I will finally – truly – really – be alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.