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.