And deeper in derp.

Wow. Jeff Beck and ZZ Top do Sixteen Tons. Bitchin’.

So yeah. Whatever. Not feeling any better about my life than yesterday. Still feel like everything is stupid and pointless and worthless.

So, ya know, just another average day here in Sad Hell.

Finished my course of antibiotics last night. So I suppose that means that I am technically “over” my pneumonia now. At least on paper.

Me, I am not so sure. I can still feel gunk in my lungs, and said lungs are kind of sore most of the time,. I haven’t been coughing much and I can’t say I feel the malaise coming back, so that’s good,

But as far as I am concerned, I am not out of the woods yet, and I will be paying very close attention to my health for the next couple of days to make sure the antibiotics did a thorough job and didn’t just cull the herd.

-Who knows. Maybe the real reason I am so pissed off and depressed lately is that I am still fighting this fucking thing and it’s ruining my mood somehow.

But nah. This shit has been coming for a very long time. It just took escaping my current life for five days then coming back to it and realizing how much it suuuuuucks to kick it off. But this storm has been brewing for years.

I am just so god damned tired of this life and this lifestyle. I long to make some kind of radical change that will truly shake thiings up by breaking all my old patterns and forcing me to create new ones.

Fresh ones. Strong ones. Ones better suited to who I really am. Ones that start from me and work outward in order to better cope with the reality of being who I really am.

Patterns that include dealing with complex emotions experienced in real time Otherwise known as “coping with reality”, Patterns that include far more of the real world than the dank and squalid little gadren known as my current comfort zone.

That sucker is way overdue for expansion and I have the land deed and zoning variances to make it happen.

All that is left is to actually do things.

Yeah… about that….

I am very much feeling the eternal stalement lately. Like for every move I make, there is a part of me – call it the Deadly Adversary – that makes the countermove that will return things to their “normal” state of total doldrums,.

I suppose, in a way, it’s a question of resolve. Part of me wants to move forward and part of me is terrified of the entire idea and willing to do whatever it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen, no matter how self-destructive.

And right now, it’s the negative side that has the power of the id behind it most of the time. That’s why the countermeasure is both instantaneous and vehement. It definitely has the force of fear and pain and all the other hard emotions behind it,

Against that, my sad little rational ego strains in vain. Most of the time. Real progress will not be made unless I can steal the energy from that bastard and grow strong enough to push back when he tries to put me in my place and hold me down.

And that means dealing with my emotions. And I mean really dealing with them, not just analyzing them to death with permanent Spock eyebrow going “How fascinating!” and mistaking intellectual gear grinding for actual progress.

So yeah. I am pissed off about my life and how it’s turned out and where I find myself at the absurd age of 45 and I am going to stay pissed off about it until something changes or I go completely insane.

Honestly, I could go either way.

It might not be fun or comfortable to stay mad like this, but I don’t give a shit. This is the only way anything is ever going to change. The deep layers of my tainted soul have to be made to believe that the only way out of this uncomfortable situation is to forge new pathways that lead to a superior solution.

Only then will the gates of my prison swing open so I can go out on leave at least. So much of the energy of my soul is set to work against itself that it can be hard to figure out how to get ahead.

Or what to do with the energy once it is released from enternal self opposition. That’s the thing – I honestly don’t know what to do with myself when I have energy.

If I am not careful, it will turn into anxiety and depression. Perhaps that’s a big part of what has been happening with me lately. My energy is coming back to me after all that time spent sick and it’s not finding anything like a decent enough outlet so it’s backing up and becoming depression etc instead.

It’s a theory, at least.

I always have a theory.  I’m a theory kind of guy.

It’s putting that shit into practice that’s the hard part.

I dunno. LArgely, I just don’t give a shit. Fuck it. Fuck it all. Fuck everyone and fuck everything. My new life motto is “I don’t know and I don’t care. Fuck off. ”

I can even sing it, if I feel like it. It’s my new nihilist anthem. It’s the perfect solution for when there are so many voices in my head asking for answers or trying to contain things I am anxious about and avoiding that I can;t hear myself think and the only way to shut them up is to brain them with a brick of rock solid id.

De doo doo doo, motherfucker.

The meaning isn’t all that’s true. That still blows my mind.

So I dunno. I guess you nice people will have to put up with my angry venting and other forms of delay-adolescence crankiness until I get a grip on myself.

Long live the new flesh, I guess,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am feeling somewhat better than I did yesterday.

But I still ain’t happy.

Part of the problem, and it shames me to admit my life is this shallow, is that I have gotten pretty burned out on that game I have been playing a ton, Elder Scrolls Online, and I have yet to find a replacement.

So now there is this big empty void in my life where the fun used to be. It’s tragic that this is what my life has become, but it’s the truth.

My mood is highly dependent on whether or not I have a good game going or not.

Seeing as I currently do not, this is a good time to start talking about why I need one so bad and what I could do to maybe try to transfer my emotional dependence from video games to something a little more productive.

If only I could re-imagine writing as a video game, and feel as safe, comfortable, and confident doing it as I do video games, as well as finding it just as rewarding.

Rewarding is the big thing. Everything we do, we do to stimulate our reward center.

But of course, life is not like a video game. Like Jane Mcgonigal said, reality is broken. In the world of video games, effort and reward are nearly always equal, persistance always pays off, everything is geared to keep you motivated with continuous small rewards leading to occqasional larger ones, you can take on roles of great status and importance and even wealth that are totally out of reach in the real world, and indeed the whole reality of the game is custom made to make you happy.

Life ain’t like that, in case you haven’t noticed.

When I am playing a good (by my standards) game, I am transported. Mundane reality ceases to exist (for the most part) and I escape my highly unsatisfactory mundane existance and go to someplace where I am important, powerful, valuable, and above all, where I can be a hero, righting wrongs and kicking the crap out of evil.

With a setup like that, why wouldn’t I prefer that world to the real one? It’s not like the real one has been especially kind to me. My real existence is a depressing drag through time where the minutes and days are to be endured, not enjoyed, and where a good day is one where the game I was playing was so good that I barely noticed the passage of time at all.

Yay, I made it through six whole hours without thinking about stuff! It’s almost like I skipped those hours entirely!

Truly, my greatest goal seems to be to make it through the day as seamlessly and effortlessly as a champion swimmer cutting through the water with their body.

That can’t possibly be right, can it? That can’t be healthy. There has to be more to life than trying to get through it with a minimum of pain.

And as patient readers knows, I do want more out of my life. I am sick to death of this sad existence of mine. I want to earn and learn and love and LIVE.  I am tired of living my life as if I am in cold storage somewhere, waiting for an ineffable something to happen in order to activate me and bring me back to life.

Whatever the fuck it is I have been waiting for, I think it is safe to say it ain’t gonna happen and whatever happens in my life, it is up to me to make it happen.

And that…. makes me sad. Which is sad.

Presumably, I had my emotional development interrupted at some crucial stage and a big part of me is simply waiting for the emotional inputs I never got in order to be able to move on to the next developmental stage, and then the next, and the next, and so on until I actually grow the fuck up.

I don’t have a solid read on what those inputs might be, but I definitely know that it has a lot to do with nurturing. I did not get the care, comfort, support, and above all the sense of safety I needed when I was a kid abandoned to the wilds of elementary school, and that fucked me up in a very big way.

And there is no way to get those inputs as an adult male. None. Adult men are viewed with unmasked contempt for even hinting that they might want that. And it’s worse if you are big and tall because you look like you “should” be able to take care of yourself.

Well I can’t. I think my life amply demonstrates that. And that’s just too fucking bad, because there is nobody out there to look after me either.

My therapist keeps telling me that I need to learn to provide these inputs for myself. But I don’t see how that can work. You can’t pick yourself up and carry yourself. It’s physically impossible. There is no part of me that is strong enough to be the inner parent that I so desperately need.

If there was, I wouldn’t even need one.

So I am fucked, more or less. Can’t help myself and nobody can help me and I can’t do jack shit without help, so fuck ME, I guess.

It’s a hell of a catch, that Catch-22.

I guess all that is left for me is what I started with : A life that is meaningless and irrelevent and inane where the best that I can hope for is a video game good enough to make me forget how much I hate myself and my life for a while.

And maybe, every now and then, when the stars align and the portents are fruitful and all the hens in the coop lay sideways eggs, I can do a little something to push against the walls of my cage and maybe get myself a tiny bit more room.

It ain’t much, but it’s all I have got.

And it’s fucking pathetic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.