Okay, here’s the situation.

My parents went away on a week’s vacation…

OK, not really. The situation is this : tonight, at around 10:30 pm, the witty and wonderful Felicity will pick me up to go hang out with us two and Joe at Felicity’s parents’ place, where we will watch videos, eat McDonalds, and chill.

This is our routine for Monday and Friday nights. We have done this for ages.

And yet, as the T-hour approaches, I am becoming increasingly anxious. And that’s insane. I know that I will be happy and have a good time there. I always am and I always do. It’s a no-brainer.

And yet, it feels like something horrible is coming and time is running out. I am experiencing not just anxiety but terror and dread as well. I feel like I am in one of those scenes where the hero has to defuse the bomb and the timer is running down. Loudly.

I hate those scenes.

So what the hell, anxiety? What is so bad about what is coming? Why to I have to go through this shit every single time I am going to go out? Why is freaking out so freaking common for me?

I don’t have a single, definitive answer. But I do have theories.

Of course I have theories.

The foremost among them has to do with treating time as an asset and why that seemingly normal and sane thing to do can actually be poisonous to me.

See, the problem is that the mental variable “time left until the thing” has a value that can only go down.   And for someone as acutely (over)sensitive to loss as I am, that is a frigging nightmare.

Because no matter what I do, the value can only decrease. And that makes me feel like I am losing something precious all the time, and that freaks me the fuck out.

On a deep level, my mind (unfortunately) registers loss as failure and so every time I look at the clock and there is less time left, a very broken and fucked up part of my mind thinks that means I am failing – screwing up – and boom goes my depression as well.

This is, quite clearly, total insanity.

But it’s what I am, for the moment, stuck with.

If I could just redefine that idiotic variable to be something other than an asset in my mind, I could nip this whole psychosis in the bud.

But I can’t see that happening, because it IS an asset. It’s the quantity of minutes I have to do whatever I want before having to pull myself together to be with others.

And perhaps that is the dreaded tragedy of it all. My mind doesn’t like having to leave this cozy mental plane of mine where it is nice and dispersed and hazy and ephemeral in order to fit back into the box known as “being a functional human being” and responds to the looming prospect with terror and dread.

Perhaps that is what agoraphobia is really about, or at least, what mine is really about. The world outside is so radically different from the world at home. It’s so much more stimulating, both physically and psychologically, .as well as socially, and when I am Out There, I have to raise my defenses and be alert and hold myself together despite the onslaught of stimulation, and all of that can be very hard on me.

So much easier to be a puddle of goo on a computer back home, where it’s safe and I don’t have to hold myself together or deal with life at all.

I can just sit here feeding my mind all the stimulation it craves and regulate my own mood via taking a nap when my background anxiety level gets too high and keep myself safely distracted from all the chaos, pain, and horror inside me.

Which gets worse over time because I never actually deal with it.

But hey, why deal with it when I  can always escape via video games n’ shit?

That is exactly how addiction always works. Whatever your motivations are for getting clean, they have to contend with the knowledge that no matter how bad the addiction makes your life,  you can escape it via the addiction.

And giving in to the addiction is always so much easier than fighting it.

Not better. Just easier.

And always doing what is easier, regardless of what is better, is the very definition of being a wimp. Of lacking character. Of being a loser. 

I understand that quite clearly now.

So here I sit, helplessly watching my anxiety levels rise and knowing that at some point, I am going to have to coalesce into a solid and walk around like I’m people.

But I’m not people. Not really. I am, at best, a slightly successful charlatan who can simulate being a normal functional human being in a very limited number of super easy low stimulus situations.

I can feel what is missing in me. I know that I have enormous blank spots where other people have normal human emotions. I can feel those gaps like they are vast open wounds. I know that, deep down, there is something fundamentally wrong with me  and there always has been, and people can tell so they avoid me.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to pretend to be one of them well enough to fit in, but it never works. I might as well be a giraffe trying to pass as a woodchuck. I am not fooling anybody and so the whole thing is wasted effort.

Maybe I would be better off if I called off the charade entirely, and just faced the world as the emotionally bizarre mutant I really am.

If I am lucky, the fact that I am charming and personable and sweet will be enough for people to tolerate how wrong I am.

But even if they don’t, it would be a huge relief to not have to tapdance so fast any more. To just be me without modulation or modification.

I don’t know that I have the courage.

But it’s a mighty fine idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One of my fave songs from RHPS. It’s musically beautiful and has such a feeling of hope and solace, so unlike most of RHPS.

Hope, comfort, solance, sanctuary, home, coming in from the darkness…. for reasons that should be obvious to patient readers, these are very powerful themes for me.

And one of my most cherished dreams is to one day be able to provide the kind of shelter for other strange people like myself.

I feel a strong kinship with all the freaks, weirdoes, drifters, bottom feeders, lowlifes, perverts, nerds, pornographers, queers, zoophiles, misfits, geeks, losers, pedophiles, all the other -philes, and everyone else society pushes into the margins and tries to pretend does not exist or at best treats like sideshow freaks.

And it would make me so happy to have a big, comfy home with tons of bedrooms so that I could provide a safe, warm, cozy home for all my crazy outcasts. Somewhere they can feel free to be themselves, and to do it as hard as they can as much as they want, without anyone to tell them to turn it down because it’s “weird”.

I have fantasized about buying a run-down motel and filling it with my kind of people. But maybe a huge house would be better, because I want people to mingle in the common areas and get to know one another.

And when I say “mingle”, I mean “have as much of whatever kind of sex they want with each other. ” Sexual minorities would be my specialty, and free love would be the goal.

It would be a lot like this movie, actually :

Only it wouldn’t be someone’s apartment, it would be a huge mansion somewhere out of the way enough to have outdoor privacy, ideally.

And it would work by orgy rules, basically. Consent is the only law. Whatever consenting adults want to do, they can do, and they can do it wherever they like except for a few designated sex-free areas for people to escape to when they feel overwhelmed or are just plain sick of it for now.

And of course, everyone would be required to clean up their messes. And sadly, certain of the more, shall we say, odorous fetishes would be restricted to certain areas.

I would hate to have to do that. I want things to be as free as possible. But the rules have to be a little tighter when it comes to things that might be fun for the participants but might ruin the fun of others.

So some things would be okay only in certain areas so people who are bothered by said things can avoid them.

But otherwise, it would be free fucking everywhere. I would (very, very gently) encourage everyone to be as available to everyone else as possible. The ideal would be to have a community where whatever you are horny for is available from someone in the community at all times.

A lot like online text based furry fandom, actually. Hmmm.

In fact, it just occurred to me, the place would have an app. A kind oif localized Tindr/Grindr/HumpR/whatever which people access in order to post something like, I dunno, “Nipple torture in the Rumpus Room in 5 minutes”  or “Little Bo Peep seeks sheep” or “Hot oil party in the jacuzzi” or something like that.

And that might all seem beyond insane to most people, but to me it would be true sanity. It would be a little island of the way the world should work. A place where people can be truly free to be who they need to be and have what they want to have with as few restrictions as can be managed.

It would even have a spiritual slash scientific mission. Because I want to see what happens when people are truly satiated. When they get as much as they want of whatever they need to actually free their minds of their neurotic burdens for a while and let them know the inner harmony that can bring.

Spritual salvation via total satisation. That would be our motto.

That’s not to say that people would do nothing but fuck all day. I imagine there would be a lot of sex but it would be neither nonstop or even the slightest bit mandatory.

The idea is that people would be free to do whatever they want in whatever quantity they desire. There would be a lot of sex, but also a lot of art, programming, theater, reading, learning, teaching…. whatever people want to do.

This might seem like the wildest form of wreckless hedonism, and in a big way it is. But in another way, it would be my attempt to transcend hedonism via fulfillment.

Oscar Wilde said that the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it, and he was right. So what happens when people have enough hedonistic satisfaction to feel like they are “all done” with that and are ready to go to the next level?

Of course, this whole thing would cost a shit ton of money, especially because I would not want to have to charge people rent.

Well, not in money, anyway. I would rather they pay me by making their art, whatever it is. Amongst other things, it would be an artists’ colony where I take care of the mundane aspects of life so the talented people could concentrate on doing their thing.

There would also be the possibility of paying one’s went with sex. I say possibility because I can be pretty fussy about sex and if someone doesn’t turn me on and I don’t like them on a personal level enough to accept it out of personal regard, then it is just plain not going to happen.

Wow, I’m at 968 words already and I have completely forgotten what I had planned to write about tonight.

Oh right! I am feeling a little better today. Hopefully I have turned the corner and can start bulding myself back up again.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel now.

Someone please tell me it’s not a train.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I tried to finish that train station story but I can’t seem to concentrate well enough to write prose right now, so it will have to wait.

Admittedly, another part of the problem is that I don’t like how it is turning out. It doesn’t make a lot of narrative sense for the Dead Man to leap right into browbeating the narrator about the consequences of him “going home” so early in the story. It should be built up to slowly. I goofed there.

So I will have to move stuff around, and that takes yet another layer of mental complexity and emotional manuevering that I just plain do not have available to me at the moment in which I am writing this.

You can only play the hand you are dealt, not the one you wish you’d  been dealt.

I feel a little less depressed than yesterday. Not a big difference but noticeable. Perhaps the improvement comes from the depression dump I did in yesterday’s blog entry.

Or maybe I am just too sleepy to be depressed.

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I have gotten maybe 5 hours of sleep in the last 30 hours or so. And it hasn’t been very good quality sleep either.

There is nothing like lack of sleep to make you depressed.

There is nothing like depression to make you lack sleep.

It’s one hell of a catch.

So I should probably take my sleeping pill soon. Not today, because the effects can really drag on and I have stuff to do today, like go to Denny’s with my friends.

But maybe the next time I officially go to bed, which will be like 7 am tomorrow.

Well, after all, I am cold and dead inside, so it makes sense that I keep vampire hours.

I’m not really a vampire though. After all, they go out and find victims and have kinky blood sex orgies and do all kinds of things outside the home.

So I am more of an agoraphobic zombie than anything else. Except I don’t want to eat people’s brains. I have quite enough trouble dealing with the ones I got.

So what kind of undead just hangs around the same place all the time?

Oh duh. I got it.

I’m a ghost.

But I am a Canadian ghost, so I haunt very quietly and politely. Barely even attract attention to myself, really.

After all, I would hate to seem rude.

It’s an apt metaphor, really, because I am rarely seen and my existence is somewhat insubstatial. I often feel like I am not really here and that I don’t really exist. Things like light and love pass right through me. Patient readers know that I seem doomed to repeat the same patterns over and over again until I finbally resolve the problem that is keeping me from passing on to the next world.

Which in this case is the real world, the one where everyone else lives. Everyone healthy, anyway. The realm where people live lives that matter and do things that count and have no idea that phantasmal creatures like myself haunt their hallways.

Perhapos it’s better than way.

Needed naptime in a big way. No surprises there.

Glad I woke up before sundown, though. Even for someone with my very tenuous connection to the world and my instincts, going to sleep in the light and waking up in the dark feels all kinds of wrong.

Speaking of instincts, I have managed to get myself to ejaculate a few times since I last talked about my so-called sex life. But the odds are still very low. For every time I manage to get off, there are at least five jackoff sessions that end with not a bang but a whimper as I just plain run out of energy before I get anywhere.

Now I have talked about the antidepressants messing with the orgasm system before. Not a lot I can do about that. As horny and frustrated as I get, I am still not going to go off my meds just so I can finally cum.

Part of me is tempted, but most of me is too smart for that shit.

However, I have been wondering about the other factors interfering with my happy squirts. I think one of them is this tendency to defer pleasure compulsively in order to hold out for something even better.

Like sure, I am sexually stimulated by whatever porn I am attempting to enjoy now, but it might get even better later on, so I should hold off cumming just in case, otherwise I will feel like I wasted the opportunity to cum harder.

All of this is happening way deep in my mind, of course. Far below the level of conscious thought. But it’s happening nevertheless and it is clearly a bad system because by that logic, it’s never time to cum. There could ALWAYS be a level of superior stimulation right around the corner, no matter how stimulated I am at any given moment in the process.

At some point, you have to cash in your chips and go home.

And I would really like to be able to do that when I want to do it.

So clearly, I need to hack my bad brain processes. I keep telling myself to enjoy the ride and not worry about the destination, and it helps a little. So does telling myself to get off the bus at the first stop, so to speak.

But reprogramming oneself is never easy – thank goodness – and so for the most part, I remain frustrated and bored.

Boredom is another factor in my lack of ejaculatory success. The thing about the Net is that is lets you thoroughly explore every little fetish you have, and eventually you have seen it all and there is no true novelty any more.

Nor is there that intoxicating feeling of finding something so sexually amazing that it blows you mind (and your wad).

So I dunno. Normally I would just wait like a week without touching myself and let the sexual potential builds up that way, but lately I have been too horny to do that.

I guess I will just have to go on wanking without a cause.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, PS, check out this crazy animation of gay butt fucking.

holy crap, that looks amazing. Better watch out, Tarzan,or you’re gonna bust that poor dude’s O-right with that thing.

He seems happy,though.

So let’s talk about how fucking depressed I have been lately.

Sorry, folks, the train station story will have to wait.

I’ve been feeling really depressed and hopeless lately. Dunno why my depression has gotten worse lately, but I suspect this is part of my excrutiating healing process. I am processing some heavy duty stuff, and while that is going on, I don’t have a lot of mental CPU cycles to spare for such petty concerns as happiness.

Stable mood is for other people, it would seem. What I get is two modes – oblivious and miserable. I am oblivious when I am wrapped up in my video games and miserable the rest of the time.

You don’t need a doctorate in applied psychology to figure out that equation. Misery bad. Oblivion good. Me do good thing. A lot.

As in, most of my waking hours.

It’s my crutch, my coping mechanism, and like all addictions, it is a coping mechanism that is great at the short term but in the long term is going to fucking kill me.

Imagine if I had to leave the apartment and do things all the time, every day. Just go out there and emulate being a real human adult for eight, ten, twelve hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year.

That thought is so horrible that my mind refuses to contemplate it. It crashes the process. When I try to contemplate it, I get a simple four letter error message instead.

And the message reads NOPE.

And I keep trying to exit this mental fugue of mine. I try to get my motor turning over so I can warm up enough for the blood to start pumping and make me feel alive and ready to Get Shit Done again.

But my depression is ready for that now. When I try to put fuel in my tank, it just cascades right back out again like a waterfall. It’s like I am trying to fill a bucket with no bottom. My engine stays dead except for a few dull clicks and a sad little whimper.

I paint pictures with words.

And it’s so frustrating to be like this. I thought I was getting somewhere. I thought that I had finally gotten to a place where I could maintain a connection to my id and tap into my rage and ambition when I needed to snap myself out of my autohypnotic state.

But at some point, everything iced over and the system no longer responds.

So I guess I have no choice but to wait it out. And let me tell you, I am not the sort of man who can be happy doing nothing. The fact that I am suffering and cannot do anything to alleviate it drives me nuts when I think about it.

So I don’t.

A shallow person might look into my life and think I do nothing all the time. But there is a big difference between doing nothing and doing nothing productive.

Video games are not productive, although they provide a convincing fascismile of productivity and progress.

Convincing enough for those of us who desperately need to be convinced, anyhow.

It’s not easy, keeping yourself in a holding pattern like I have been doing my entire adult life. you have to shut out the vast majority of the universe while also ignoring/suppressing all the healthy instincts that lead healthy people to do the healthy things that keep them healthy.

No wonder I am such a fucking icicle. How else could I block/ignore/suppress so much and keep my universe to a size and form I can handle with my feeble will and self? I have to maintain that bitter arctic chill inside or all the frozen things in my graveyard of a soul will wake up and start moving around and remember what they were going to do before I put them on ice.

So as much as I hate the total lack of emotional warmth reaching my soul, I have evidently decided that it’s still better than the utter chaos that would occur if all my dead things came back to life.

I am not sure I agree with that decision. Strikes me as distinctly unhealthful. It’s the sort of move that only makes sense if you are too freaked out to give a single thought to long term consequences and live in a constant city under siege mentality.

That’s how stress kills you. It keeps you in an adrenalized mode and in that mode your body heavily prioritizes the short term and ignores things like maintenance and repair under the assumption that what is important right now is not getting eaten by that tiger.

But you know that already. I have told you that before, probably many times.

I repeat myself when I’m distressed. I repeat myself when under stress. I repeat….

I just feel so lost and hopeless lately. I feel like I have a tourniquet wrapped around me and every time I try to escape my current mental state, it just twists the tourniquet tighter and squeezes that much more of the life out of me.

I shared these happy thoughts with my therapist on Thursday. It made excellent ammo for my guilt tripping him about the fact he’s going away for two weeks soon.

He asked me if I was in danger, and I thought about it for a while. I had to really search through my emotions to come up with an answer. I am certainly quite depressed lately, so danger is not out of the question.

Eventually I said no. Then he asked me if I would check myself in to the hospital if I started feeling the danger. I said yes.

I am not sure either answer was entirely honest. I don’t feel suicidal, consciously at least, but I did spontaneously begin writing a story based around a heavy handed metaphor for suicide and I did feel a bit of danger when I listened to this song :

The last thing I need in my current mental state is a very moving song about a joyous, ecstatic, and transcendant death.

In fact, I now kind of hate that song and those that created it a little.

But I think I will be fine. I just have to wait this out.

Good thing I got all these video games to keep me busy!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

IHere we go with this subject again.

An enemy I am fighting in the video game I am playing keeps telling me I am a fool to trust this other character and that got me thinking about my relationship with trust.

Because on one angle, I don’t trust anyone at all ever. But only if you define trust as a kind of faith – as a belief in things not in evidence.

I am not capable of faith, as far as I can tell. My life has contained too much harshness and abandonment for that. The people in my life failed me constantly and I never had religion so I could not replace them with Allah or Jesus or anyone else for that matter.

I think in order to have faith, on some level you have to think that the world is basically on your side, or at the very least not actively hostile toward you, and my life, especially my childhood, has not encouraged that belief.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

So if I do not have faith  in people or the universe or anything, what do I have?

Knowledge and understanding. I have faith in the products of my own mind. I trust my knowledge and understanding of the world because I can examine it and verify it and even modify it if I find it to be faulty.

This renders faith unnecessary. But not useless, evil, or undesirable.

Sure, I don’t need faith to support my cosmology, my morality, or my insights, but those are only the cold-circuit aspects of faith.

But faith, whether it’s in a deity or just the world in general, does so much more than that for people. It provides comfort, warmth, strength, vitality. and hope. All hot-circuit things. Faith covers so many basic emotional needs that I see it as being like an emotional insurance policy that guarantees your emotional needs will be met at a minimal level no matter what.

Compare that to the faithless like myself and the contrast is startling. If my life fails to meet my basic emotional needs for things like love and comfort and community and so on, all I can do is suffer. I have no buffer against the harshness of the world.

It is like emotionally healthy people who have some degree of faith are fully clothed and standing in the sunlight, and I am naked in the cold and the dark and fiercely clutching the knowledge that sure, I am freezing to death, but at least I am more “right” than they are. My internal model of the universe corresponds to the real world more than theirs because mine contains a lot less “bullshit”.

Big. Fucking. Deal.

They’re the happy ones. The people who can live, love, cope, celebrate, and do all the other things that my cold and barren soul can only watch with drooling envy, knowing that the bright and shining world has no place for me.

It’s like I am the Grinch, high up on my mountain, watching the residents of Whoville through my telescope, and telling myself how much better than them I am.

Well, they’re happy, and you’re freezing, so…

Back to whether I trust people.  The answer is still no, I am afraid. I only trust what I know about people. Now thanks to my powers of empathy, insight,  and analysis, I know a lot about people in general and the people I know in particular.

In fact, I often know more about them than they know themselves.

Took me a while to learn to keep THAT to myself.

So because I have this ability to understand what makes people tick (hint : watches), it is easy to fool myself into thinking I really do trust people. I can certainly act exactly as if I do. And in a sense, I really do.

But in another sense, what I really trust is my own knowledge and understanding of people. Faith, like I said before, is absent.

And while that system works more often than not, it does mean I am a fundamentally suspicious and mistrustful person.

I would rather not be. It’s not the sort of person I like to think of myself as, that’s for sure. I would rather be like Fruvous, overflowing with life and laughter and love, and able to joyfully embrace life and maybe nibble on its ear a little.

But there is who we want to be, and who we end up being. If I could, I would scout all the bitterness, mistrust. hostility, bad wiring, and unhealthy memories from my mind and start over from a happier and more open-minded position.

That would certainly be a much healthier version of me. It might even be the version of me that I would have been had I never been raped as a child.

But I was. And that led to a lot more harshness and unpleasantness that also left huge scars on my psyche and left me emotionally isolated within my hard chilled little world of intellectual pleasures. I spent many formative years living in a world of my own where I went to school alone, was alone at school, walked home alone, then went to my room alone, and read alone, or played video games alone, or watched TV alone.

That’s no way to live, let alone grow up. And there but for my group of friends go I right till this day. If not for Joe, Julian, and Felicity, I would be still be alone in the dark.

There are no words, even for me, to describe how grateful I am for that.

And yet I know even they don’t truly have access to my inner self. I am still all alone in here, and I guess I always will be.

They are closer to me than anyone else in the world, and yet I know that they are not that close to me. Not really.

I am still naked and cold in the darkness of my soul.

But it’s nice to be able to get close enough to feel the warmth of the living from time to time, and pretend I am alive.

It’s not much but it is the best I can do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, kids. The story with the train station and the ticket will continue, either tomorrow or Saturday.

But today I got to blog. Because today’s therapy session did not go well and I need to vent about it.

Hmmm. Now where to start…..

Meh. Might as well cut straight to the chase. After the usual badminton game of me saying some things and then my therapist arguing with me over word choice before rambling off on some tangent while I patiently way for the next opportunity to express my actial emotions. we came to the point where I was expressing some really deep shit. And, miracle diablu, he was really listening.

This point, as always, came at the point where we were almost out of time. I am not sure why the really good stuff only comes out near the end of the session. Maybe it takes that long for me to truly lower my defenses, I dunno.

But if I ever work out how to skip the first part, therapy will get WAY better.

Anyhow, I was getting down to the nittiest of the gritties, it occurred to me that what I really wanted, deep down. was for someone to see how much pain I was in, and express some sympathy.

That’s what the scared lonely little boy inside me wants most of all. For someone to notice how scared and lonely and freaked out by the world he is, and say ‘you poor thing. You must be in a lot of pain. ‘

Because that’s what I never got as a kid, or ever, really. Sure, lots of people went on record as being sympathetic to me in theory.

But nobody has ever been willing to come to me where I am, down this deep dark hole, and see my pain and my suffering, and connect with it in some way.

I’ve always been locked in here all alone. Nobody has come even close to being willing to join me in my world, let alone make a real attempt at rescue.

And my therapist is no different, because when I told him that I needed someone to sympathize, the first words out of his goddamned mouth were ‘yourself. You’ll have to do that for yourself. ‘

He didn’t even pause before saying it. It was like an autonomic response.

And this struck me as being somewhat less than sympathetic.

So we got into an argument about it. And it soon became clear that in his mind, he was there to help me, yet that did not involve him expressing any sympathy toward me on any level whatsover.

I wanted to know why he was so against being sympathetic to me.

But then the session ended. Which is why I am still pissed off about it.

And the thing is, I know what really happened. He would probably never cop to this, but I know what was really going on.

Just like everyone else, he got to the edge of my abyss and it terrified him. Instinctively, he knew he might never escape a well that deep, and so he did what everyone else does, namely refuse to actually emotionally connect with me.

No wonder I have trust issues.

In that moment, I was opening up to him more than I had ever opened up to anyone ever before, and what did I get?

Rejection and abandonment, of course. I mean, what else is there in my life?

Think about it. What would have been so hard about saying he cared about my pain? Answer : he would have had to leave his emotionally constipated male therapist’s bubble and actually connect with me on an emotional level.

And people just do not want to go there. My pain scares the shit out of people. They afraid that if they even touch it, it will destroy them.

And who knows, they might be right.

But a therapist is supposed to be beyond that. They are healers and healers do whatever it takes to help the patient. They don’t reject their patients at their most vulnerable moment. They don’t refuse to connect to patients who need to connect with others more than anything else in the world.

So in my opinion, he failed me. Just like everyone else.  Sure, I can get surface sympathy. There are even people who truly and deeply care for me.

Up to a point.

But there is nobody who can and will survive the harsh conditions on my lonely little planet long enough to really connect with me.

I have been blaming myself for my inability to really connect with others for a long long time. I thought I was fundamentally broken somehow and that is why I was doomed to be be alone in here forever.

And that is still true, in a way. But now I can see how others have failed me, too.

Nobody is strong enough to handle me. And that’s been true all my life. I was hard to handle as a kid so people just ignored me. It never even occurred to them that I might be worth the effort. That there was a worthy person inside all that intelllect and emotional neediness and social maladjustment who just needed someone to hang in there with him and give him someone and something to hold onto amidst all the chaos and darkness in his mind.

But nobody thought I was worth it. I was too much work. Too difficult. Too needy. Too unpredictable. Too challenging.

So that’s it, I guess. I will be alone inside forever. I might be able to reach people’s hearts tghrough my writing but when it comes to connecting with others on a personal. emotional level, it’s just not going to happen.

People will always take one look over the precipice, say “Yikes!”, and scram.

And that fills me with pure cold hate. Hate for everything and everyone in this coldhearted shit hole of a world.

I’ve tried to let people in many, many times in my life.

And they have always said “Um NO.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Why? Because my Internet don’t work no more.

And that’s an improvement. Earlier the whole computer did not work. I had to reboot half a dozen times before I saw my desktop again.

And let me just comment, for the record, that I am really sick and fucking tired of being thrown into situations where I have to work like hell just to get back to neutral.

There’s something extremely disheartening about going through a lot of stress and thinking and ingenuity and just plain sweat equity into solving a problem only to realize that all you got out of all that work was exactly what you had before this clusterfuck even happened.

I spent a lot of the last hour and a half thinking Windows bricked my computer.

See, here’s the thing : earlier today, I noticed that the Internet had stopped working on my tablet. No big deal, I mostly use the thing to play games anyhow.

Then I go to use my computer and note that, unsurprisingly, the Internet is dead here too. It would have been nice if it had been a problem with my tablet and not our local WiFi, but that was hardly probable.

So I do what anyone might do in the situation : I rebooted. Or, in the language of the IT Crowd, I turned it off then on again.

And when I did so, the options were “update and shut down” or “update and reboot”. Normally, the bit about updating isn’t there.

And I didn’t think twice about that. I knew what it meant : that Windows had downloaded an update to itself and was poised to apply it the next time I rebooted, whether I liked it or not.

Operating systems can be so bossy.

So I go ahead and reboot, but when Windows comes back it comes back wrong.

Dunno why, but my guess is that it was not happy about trying to update itself without the Internet there for last moment file updates or whatever.

Of course, the only reason I rebooted in the first place was because my Internet wasn’t working. If our ‘Net hadn’t shit the bed and died, none of this would have happened.

In a word : grr.

So at first, it rebooted into a (very pretty) picture of colourful hot air balloons floating in an azure sky over verdant green meadows made all the more lovely by bright yellow sunshine.

I am telling you…blue sky, green grass, yellow sun…. these things are encoded into our DNA in order to lead us to our proper habitat. That’s why they make us so happy.

Anyhoo. At first I got the pretty picture and that was it. Not exactly the OS I am used to.

Then I rebooted again, and this time I got to the balloons AND the screen where it normally asks me to put in my password.

I keep meaning to download the thingy that lets me bypass the password, but I never get around to it because it only comes up when I reboot and that happens like… once a month, maybe?

That’s not nearly enough annoyance to motivate me.

So I get to the screen where it asks me for my password but… it doesn’t ask.

Next reboot, it asks, I input it, and then it just sits there on the balloon picture, as if to say, “Well, my job is done here. Good job all! “

Reboot again, this time after having removed everything superfluous from the boot sequence.

And there was a lot of it. Damn programs think they have a right to put part of themselves in your boot sequence without even telling you.

That reboot got me as far as…. a totally black screen!

Wow…… such progress.

And I got that black screen for several more reboots. Depressed, I decided I would try to tackle the Internet problem. Easy enough… just power cycle the router, right?

Except I can’t because we have so much bullshit piled everywhere in the living room that I haven’t the slightest clue as to where the router is in the first place.

And I am so sick of this shit. We have huge stacks of stuff we don’t need, never use, and honestly have no reason to own, especially in an apartment this small.

Basically, my roomie Joe is a hoarder. Sort of. I don’t consider him to be a full on hoarder because for the most part, the hoard is organized. He knows where stuff is. Nothing is rotting or dead in it.

But most of the syndrome is there. He “rescues” things. Things that would have ended up in the landfill were it not for his thoughtful intervention. Useful things it would be a waste to throw out. Right.

I am all for reducing the amount of senseless waste in the world. That’s the whole reason I founded and ran the Vancouver Freecycle.

It’s the next part I have a big issue with.

See, after he “rescues” something, it gets added to the hoard and for the most part disappears, subjectively speaking. It is exactly like the classic hoarder “clutter blindness”. Whatever it was becomes part of the hoard and thus a fixed part of the environment, like the furniture.

And there it shall stay. The “rescue” was pointless because the stuff never goes to someone who will use it. It stays here with us, completely ignored, every bit as “wasted” as if it had gone to the landfill.

The clincher for the case for hoarding is that when I try to talk to Joe about this, he has no arguments to support his “collecting” habit.

I say to him, “I am glad you rescue these things but that doesn’t mean we have to own them forever. They should be going to Value Village!” and he can’t argue with that.

And yet, nothing changes. The place is still as full of crap as ever. Small things do end up at Value Village but for the most part, the hoard grows unchecked.

And the thing is, I get the urge to acquire. I really, really do. Joe is a Taurus, just like me, and our karmic mission is to accumulate value.

But I also have an antipathy towards things taking up space for no reason. And I don’t particularly like living in a jam packed packrat environment. I would rather live someplace with more free space and better airflow and some fricking room to manoeuvre.

It’s ironic that I went from living with Angela, a full blown food/pet/tchotchke hoarder, to living with an admittedly much better class of hoarder in Joe.

But I dream of living a pared down minimalist life. The kind where you only keep things around if they make you happy. Everything else goes to others who will give it a good home.

As is, I won’t be able to try to fix our Internet until…. wait a sec.

Why I’ll be darned. The Internet fixed itself while I was bitchin’.

I guess that’s it from me for tonight, then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

So I’ve been up to stuff.

Not the things I should be doing, of course. That’s too hard. I have been feeling very weak lately and that means my ability to resist and overcome my encyclopedia of issues is at an all time low.

Bottom five at best.

But I have at least done some things that added some novelty to my life, and by doing so, took a tiny little baby step towards my own recovery and added at least a few drops of vitality to my washed out and wimpy condition.

All I can do is wait for my next “good period”.

Man, that sucks.

Anyhow, the new thing I did most recently – as in less than five minutes ago – was watch the first episode of the new Ducktales series on Netflix.

Now as alert readers knows, I am extremely unfond of this modern trend of rebooting shit. I now accpet as an article of faith that the entire phenomenon of rebooting is doomed to emotionally savage those whom it should benefit the most, namely the long time fans who never stopped loving the rebooted thing and who have held a torch for it all the lonely years when it was obsolete and neglected.

The problem is that a love that strong tends to get very specific. Over the years, one’s appreciation for the beloved franchise deepens, and in the process, the fan in question homes in on what, exactly, it is that the makes them love their fave thing(s).

It’s the exactly same thing that happens with romantic love and deep friendship.

However, this means that any attempt to create more of the franchise would have to match an extremely detailed pattern in our putative fan’s mind and at least some of that pattern will be made of the fan’s memories of the franchise. and those memories were undoubtedly formed by a much younger version of the fan back when they were kids and hence a lot less critical of the world.

That’s why even the original product often disappoints us when we are adults. My go-to example of this is Spider Man And His Amazing Friends. When I was a kid, that was hands down my favorite show in the entire universe. Spidey is my guy and seeing him every Saturday morning made me deliriously happy.

I watch it now, and it’s quite cheesy. lame, and cheap.

So it goes.

Anyhow,. even if some creator somehow made a new product that completely matched a fan’s particular franchise DNA fingerprint, it still might lose out because it is now competing with those sacred memories and is therefore met with a hostility the fan often doesn’t even understand themselves.

And I very much include myself in this group of impossible to please fans. And I haven’t even gotten into how what matches one fan’s franchise specification no doubt physically violates the sacred memories of every other long term fans.

That said, the new Ducktales is pretty darn good.

I can say that because I was never into the original. As a kid, my only exposure to the comics on which the series is based was from when I was waiting for a haircut as a kid and the only thing to read was ancient kiddie comics from the days of Little LuLu.

To my fussy little self, those comics were hopelessly lame and pathetically dull and made me feel like the kids of the past must have been frigging brain damaged to have enjoyed those comics.

Ergo, not going to tune in to an after-school Disney show based on them.

The new show, however, is great. It’s action packed, unpredictable. colorfully animated, has superb voice acting (including Davis Tennant as Scroogle McDuck himself), and best of all, the writing is surprisingly witty even by adult standards.

I also approve of the addition of an enthusiastic (if somewhat squirrely) female duckling to the gang, mostly because she reminds me of my favorite part of Darkwing Duck, namely his daughter Goslyn Mallard.

So color me a fan of the new show! Tons o’ fun.

The other new thing is that I signed up for a service called Utomik.It bills itself as Netflix for games, and that is more or less what it is.

The idea is that for a monthly fee ($10 per month, quite reasonable) you get access to their entire collection of almost 800 games. I can download and play any of their games for as long as I want.

And the first 14 days are free. So, no real risk.

Now obviously, these are not going to be the latest hottest games. Most of them, in fact, are old and/or lame. So it’s hardly the great gamer’s smorgasbord they make it out to be. You can forget that notion right away. \

However, the fact that the games are old does not mean they all suck. So this could work well for me for when I am between AAA current titles and need something to play.

The other caveat is that, of course, you still need to download the thing in order to play it. It’s possible that the download is smaller than if you bought the thing on Steam, but it is still a long way from instant access.

No big deal, really. It still might be worth it to me. Time will tell. It’s a very reasonable monthly fee and the bottom line is that I can amass a game collection that would cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars if I bought the games individually for just 10 bucks a monthm and that’s potentuially very cool.

Although ironically, right now the game I am played via Utomik is Darksiders, a game I actually own and have played through twice before.

I played it ages ago and it’s an awesome game, but still. it seems ironic that after trying several other games via them, I ended up on the tried n’ true.

So those are the new-ish things in my life.

Kind of pathetic, aren’t they?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I finally did it – I wrote something in more than one sitting.

My NaNoWriMo novels of yesteryear don’t count. I wrote those a chapter at a time, and each chapter was written in one sitting, so I never had to pause something in the middle then come back to it later.

But I did for that silly little ghost story I wrote recently. I started it during the week qand finished it yesterday. And while I am a little worried that the tone is not consistent between the two parts, the important thing is that I finished the fucking thing, and without any egregious shortcuts either.

All my shortcuts were totally gregious, dude!

And I am pleased with myself for this. I feel like I have grown as a writer as a result of this rare act of multi-stage writing and that makes me feel very good. I feel like I can tackle larger things now.

Sadly, I am still not strong enough to be able to proofread and edit and polish my own workers. That is still a little bit too much like trying to perform surgery on myself in a moving vehicle for me.

I suppose the problem is that I either cannot or will not detach myself enough from what I have written to be able to view it cooly and objectively. Everything I write remains a part of me, psychologically speaking. And that makes it way too hard to treat it as something dead,. just so much text to be carved and polished and sold.

I get the feeling that if I actually was able to detach myself that much from what I have written, I would then become disgusted with it as the dead flesh that it is and the last thing I would want to do is spend time perfecting it.

I’d just want to put as much distance between the dead thing and myself as possible.

And that is, in essence, what actually happens. I never want to go back to the thing to make it presentable. That would be gross to me, weirdly enough. I want to move on to the next thing and do what I do best, which is create.

And that’s why I go on about needing someone else in the mix. A very patient and understanding editor, perhaps. Or an agent.

Of course, in order to get someone like that in my life, I would have to do something crazy, like go look, and that would take me outside my tiny anemic comfort zone, and so that is probably not going to happen.

It’s downright tragic how feeble a lifeform I am.

In fact, a lot of my problems in life have my problem with Other People at their route. I was going to bring that up in my Fru’s Sex Life column on Friday but I forgot.

The problem is that I can talk my good game all I want about all these things I should, could, or will do, but if those plans involve approaching someone I do not know and asking for something, the cripping dose of ice-cold terror that floods my soul from the pit of my stomach out kind of tells me it ain’t gonna happen.

I hate that fear. It keeps me down. Hold me back. Keeps me in my place. I could do so much more with my life if I could just get rid of it. It is the main thing that keeps me from doing anything with my life.

Well, that and being too weak to help myself most of the time.

I suppose that’s basically the same thing.

I could rock this world of ours if I only had the vitality and wherewithal to put myself out there and compete. But just the thought of it makes me crumble and cringe inside. I just fall apart like I am Icarus and I flew too close to the sun.

What I need is a deeper and stronger connection to my ever-lovin’ id. The only thing that I know of that can counter the douche chill effects of my weakness and fear is a strong inpuit from the heat and passion of the id.

But that complicates matters. My mind, by default, is structure against such a connection. It is built, instead, to maintain control and clarity of thought, and the chaotic nature of hot passionate emotions makes them anathema to such a state of mind.

Changing that is a tricky operation that (of course) takes a really long time.

And I am so goddamned sick of everything in my lfie being like that. I long for the capacity for transformation. Transcendence, even. SOme sort of mental mathematical function that lets the necessary rebalancings happen unimpeded and then leave me to pick up the pieces and adjust to the new normal.

The Flood, in other words.

But for good and for bad, I am built for long term stability. Like the Energizer bunny, I just keep going, and going, and going.

And to be honest, I don’t really have the kind of courage it would take to press that magic reset button. If I really wanted to, I could probably initiate that chain reaction in my mind if I really drilled down into my issues and found that part of my mind that would initiate the purging protocol.

It would be the psychological equivalent of a finger down the throat.

But I am far too terrified of the ensuing chaos to do it. It would feel like suicide. And it would BE suicide, in a way. But only in the sense that any large scale change in oneself is suicide in that it “kills” your current self as you understand it.

By default, our definition of self is “everything that I am right now”.  Accepting change therefore requires a more flexible sense of self that has faith that who we really are does not change and it is therefore “safe” to change the inessentials.

Faith has never been my strong suit. Even faith in things that are demonstrably true and perfectly in keeping with my high standards of logic and reason.

I don’t trust the universe enough to have faith in anything.

I have been hurt too much for that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.