Specifically, in maintaining it.

I really need to get my sleep organized. Right now it’s highly fragmented. As a result, I never know when I will get very sleepy and hence have to fight the velvet fog of Dreamland just to get anything done.

And that is both depressing and stressful.

So it’s depressful.

That means I have to start getting dressed for the day. Yeah, I am still lounging around naked when I am alone, even though I know it is bad for me.

It’s so easy and low commitment that it is hard for me to resist. Especially in this heat. Normally, what gets me to put on clothes is that some part of me is cold.

But not in this kind of weather. God dammit.

Anyhow, today is confession day, because I have realized something about my life and how I am living it right now that fills me with shame but that I feel like I absolutely must express to the world in order to keep it from disappearing into the primordial haze of my brain as an unwanted truth and thus not helping me grow.

I trust that will eventually make sense to most people.

My confession is this : progress in video games is my substitute for progress in life.

I figured this out when I was trying to puzzle out why sometimes playing my games felt like a job and why I felt like I was falling behind when I didn’t play them and why a lack of progress in one could make me far more depressed than you would think.

I feel so lame admitting all this. It’s downright pathetic. It’s a humiliating thing to realize about myself because it makes me feel like such a loser. A grown man who uses video games as a substitute for actually gettings things done in life.

But the evidence is clear, as is my introspective sense of what is going on in this voluminous cabeza of mine. Video games are where I get my sense of progress and accomplishment even though playing them doesn’t accomplish jack shit.

And Jack left town.

The “great” thing about progress in video games is that I can do it completely alone. That means that there is nobody watching to judge me if I screw up. Nobody is there getting impatient with me when I don’t get it right the first time. There is nobody to make me feel like I don’t belong there and should just go.

And the best thing is, I don’t have to deal with reality in the slightest!

It’s the perfect drug.

And the fact that playing a video game doesn’t accomplish anything real is not a bug in the process, it’s a feature. Real world progress creates the expectation of more progress to come, and hence creates pressure.

And I cannot handle pressure.

At least, not that kind of pressure. I thrive on other kinds of pressure, like deadlines or a heavy workload or writing a million words in a year.

So what’s the difference? Hmmm. Hard to say. Perhaps the kind of pressure I love is the kind that I am confident I can handle and that I can see coming.

And the kind that freaks me out is open-ended and unpredictable and makes me feel like I am trapped.

Maybe it’s a mood thing. I dunno.

Anyhow, that’s today big confession. I use the false progress in video games as a substitute for real progress in my life.

It’s also a substitute for having a job, which is even sadder. Video games give me a sense of purpose and direction and someplace to focus all that mental energy that I generate with my big bad brain.

I wonder if it’s that energy that gives me my strange aura. The one that makes people say “You’re obviously really intelligent… ”

I think that, at some early age, I must have tuned in to the “brightness” channel and learned to radiate my energies in that direction in order to get adults to be impressed by me and to make my mother happy with me.

But there is more to life than making people see how fucking brilliant I am.

Repeat until believed.

I really do feel a strong urge to prove myself. That’s normal for a teenager but a little odd in a 45 year old who is only now experiencing emotional puberty.

And I have so much to prove. I know that I am a brilliant guy who could make amazing television if given the chance.

It’s getting the chance that confounds me. And that’s always been the case. There’s a zillion jobs I could do splendidly but I will never get those jobs because employers are going to look at the 20 year gap in my employment record and shitcan my resume without even asking me a question.

And if I did, by accident, get a job interview, that same thing will come up.

And the only answer I have to explain all that time is “I’ve been very sick”.

But I feel MUCH better now.

And sure, if the world was fair, that would be enough. But the world isn’t fair and they have a lot of applicants who don’t have all that time in the penalty box hanging over their heads and why the hell did I even bother trying to have hope.

But I do have hope. Because I think it is possible that I could dazzle a potential employer with my charisma and personality to the point where they forget all about odd things about my resume.

I am only now coming to understand my power of personaity. I have always feared and suppressed it before. I suppose I didn’t want the responsibility.

But now I am totally down with turning my bright and shiny personality up to 11 in order to get what I want.

Now if only I could get that interview. And not just in the literal sense. I am sure I could get SOMEone to give me some kind of chance eventually.

But that woukd involved a lot of faith in myself, persistance, and a constant input of energy, and I am not so good at those yet,.

But I am learning more every day.

WIsh me luck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’d really like to know.

Because I’m not one. Not really. I am, at best, a reasonable facsimilie of one.

And yeah, I know that makes no sense. To the world, I am exactly as much of a person as anybody else.

Well, buck up, patient readers, because the nonsense has only just begun.

When I say I am not a person, what I am saying is that I do not feel like one. To me, it feels like other people are solid and real and I am just a shadow traced on smoke. The simplest of simpletons seems, to me, to have more substance and vitality than I have or will ever have.

Perhaps this is a side effect of a corrupted empathy. On the empathic channel. other people stand out like floodlit statues to me.

But my own self is so familiar to me that I don’t see it any more. It’s the background of the background of my life. So I don’t feel its presence.

There’s more to it than that, though. I can feel it. There is something that is supposed to be there within me that pushes back at the overwhelming reality of others and establishes my own identity as distinct, equal, and sufficient.

I call this thing – this missing substance – ‘self”.

It’s not hard to see how I ended up in this fix. My profound sense of vulnerability caused me to cling to my tiny world and tune out all emotions and instincts that would lead me out of it. That included the social growth and self-actualization instincts that lead most people to explore their boundaries, find out who they really are, and grow into emotionally balanced adults who can, like, do stuff.

But not me. Oh no. I was too “smart” for that. Why would I follow some mysterious urge to go out and find others my age and hang out when it “made no sense”? Why would I go looking for sex when I “knew” that would only get me in trouble because of the whole small town closeted gay thing? What was the “point” of thinking about how lonely I was when I could just stay distracted and not think about it?

Now here I am, 45 years old, and wondering if it’s too late to become a real person with a solid sense of identity and an idea of who I really am.

And that takes me back to the idea of moving out and moving on. It would be a huge step towards figuring myself out. I would love to find a nice place off the artsy part of Commercial and meet new people that way.

Or maybe get myself a sugar daddy on Davie. That would work too.

But it’s not something I will be able to accomplish with one big act of will.All I can do is wait for those moments when the fog parts to push myself a little further towards it.

That way I can get there, over time.

Sometimes baby steps are the only ones you can take.

Well, it’s 11:24 PM and that means I have 36 minutes to write 487 words.

(elaborate knuckle crack) Noooo problem.

At least it’s a sane temperature now. The other half of this blog entry was written in the hellish heat of the afternoon, and it’s a wonder it’s even coherent, let alone sensible.

I hearby declare summer to officially suck. And for once, pretty much everyone else agrees. This heat is making everyone miserable. It’s way hotter that the seasonal norm.

Good thing global warming is a myth, or we’d have something to worry about.

And there is no winning. I can’t even siesta my way through the heat because it’s way too hot to sleep in the afternoons.

I don’t know how the Mexicans manage it. Years of experience, I suppose.

Plus, for them, it’s probably a dry heat. And I have experiences both (extremely) dry heat and (very) wet heat, and let me tell you, dry heat is way better.

At least in dry heat, your sweat evaporates quickly and cools you down. In fact, if you are from a wet climate like me ^[1], that rapid evaporation fools you into thinking it’s not all that hot.

It also means you can get dehydrated fast. And that can really fuck you up if you don’t realize what is going on and thus know how to fix it.

But dry heat is still way better because at least it doesn’t make it hard to breathe like humid heat does.

Had therapy today. It was a decent session. Better than last week’s session, where I was only half awake and therefore not exactly my usual sharply perceptive and expressive self who sort of directs the therapy himself.

Because that’s the only way to make absolutely sure it’s done RIGHT. *eye twitch* WHAT CONTROL ISSUES?

Took a cab there. That’s normal. Then took a cab to my bank to cash my monthly cheque. Mildly unusual.

But the real new ground was that I got the cab to wait for me while I was in the bank, then took it home.

In fact, I had never asked a cab to wait for me before. I had been in cabs when it happened a couple of times, but never asked for it myself.

And that wait cost me around ten bucks. So, probably not something I am going to do again. seeing as my bank is like five blocks from my home.

But I am resisting the compulsion to obsess over the money I “wasted”. I tried something new.  I thought it might make me feel more grown-up and in control and all that good stuff.

Turn out, it did not. I just felt silly. But now I know.

And the only failed experiment is one that produces no result, right? This one’s result was that I don’t feel like it was worth the money.

And that’s worth the ten b ucks I spent. I think.

So STFU, compulsions!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.