In general. All else being equal, do not interrupt me in whatever I am doing. I hate it. And if you have to do it, and you have a choice as to how, don’t do it in a way that means I have to deal with whatever it is RIGHT NOW. 

Like I have said many times before, I don’t do “sudden”. Sudden is bad. Sudden scrambles my nerves and wrecks my calm. It harshes my mellow, man. And the effects can last hours. 

I am such a delicate flower. 

Here’s what happened just now : I decide I want KFC for tonight’s Saturday night ordering in dinner.  So I go to the website. 

The first roadblock life throws at me on my journey to fried chicken happiness is that since the last time I ordered directly from KFC, they have added extra security (sigh) so now I have to input a four digit number they just emailed me to continue. 

Annoying but no big deal. Lots of sites do this. Takes a few seconds to do. 

But then it makes me pick a new password, and of course the new password has to meet stricter criterion than the last one, so now I have to make up a new password that has an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number, and a typographical symbol. 

I can think of a few choice typographical symbols I could use. 

So now I have been interrupted by irritating hassles twice in the space of five minutes when all I wanna do is order some food. 

Eventually I get past that and find that KFC’s website looks totally different and has been reorganized. 

That’s a small thing but it added to the aggravation.

So I order my usual four piece box meal deal thingie, and the website says my order will be ready in 40 minutes. 

Perfect. I needed to poop anyhow, and that gave me enough time. 

So there I am, astride the throne, getting my business done while doing a crossword on my tablet. I was at peace. Cheerful, even. Looking forward to tasty foods and blogging and stuff. 

But I am not there five minutes before the phone rings. 

I decide to ignore it, letting it go to voicemail. I figure there is no way it is for me. After all, the only people who might call are KFC and they are not due for 35 minutes. 

So I ignore it. But then it rings again, and I quite reluctantly decide that I have to interrupt the operation in progress in order to be by the phone if said person calls a third time. 

That’s the worst interruption of them all, of course. For me, bathroom time is quiet time, and jarring me out of that is a serious crime. 

So I sit down at the computer and wait. Five minutes later, the phone rings. It’s the manager of the KFC. His driver is waiting outside and says I am not answering the phone. 

I say, “yeah, because the website said 40 minutes and it’s been like ten. ” 

That is, I eventually say that, because at random moments I hear this goddamned super high pitched electronic chirp that deafens me and further scrambles my nerves and I have to get the guy to repeat what he says twice in order to get it all. 

Clearly, they are trying to break me. 

I have no idea where that damned sound was coming from. I am guessing KFC’s phone system. Maybe it was trying to text me, I dunno. 

Anyhow, eventually I get the message and go down and get my food and my long national nightmare is finally over. 

But my nerves are shot and it’s been almost an hour since then now and my nerves still are jangling at me discordantly like someone is ringing all the bells in a full bell carillon all at once. 

It frigging sucks, is what I am saying. 

I imagine my nerves won’t fully recover until I have had a chance to lie down and maybe nap, and that points to a problem. 

I fear I have become emotionally (and neurologically) dependent on being able to escape life by taking a nap or at least zeroing out, and that’s going to be a problem if I ever want to get out of my little cage and deal with the world like a grownup. 

So ideally, I want to learn a better way to cope. 

But like I said yesterday, I am doing what I am supposed to be doing, namely doing my best to get well. 

So it’s something I would like to have, but in the same way someone with no legs wishes they could walk. 

Maybe one day it will be possible, maybe not. 

But either way, it would be nice. 

And I know this whole “no interruptions” thing poses some serious problems because, viewed loosely and broadly, absolutely everything is interrupting something and therefore I would be damned near impossible to deal with. 

The sad and shameful part is that a little part of me like the idea of being that hard to handle. 

I have some serious boundary setting issues. I must, if such extreme solutions appeal to me. Anything but having to set the boundaries myself, even it means social isolation. 

Without being able to set and maintain sensible boundaries in my personal life, I am left feeling very vulnerable almost all the time. It’s like not having an immune system. I lack the most basic of defenses against the chaotic influences of this turbulent world. 

The current solution, namely keeping myself safe by remaining isolated most of the time, is clearly deficient. It works but it costs far too much to be considered even remotely sufficient, or even efficient.

It’s not who I want to be. I want to be socially nimble and able to swim the waters of human relationships without fear. 

But for now, I have to stay on shore and learn by observation. 

The view is great but it is oh so cold. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

First of all, I have never known what I am supposed to be doing with my life. Like, never ever. 

That’s a big part of why I just coasted through school. Granted, I am not by nature an ambitious and focused person. My basic nature is far more slack and impromptu than that.  Those people who have known since they were a kid exactly what they want out of life and vigorously pursue that from the beginning kind of freak me out. 

Like, how can you be so sure? Things change. People change. Priorities change. Everything changes. So how can you commit to such a long term plan that it starts in frigging kindergarten? 

My theory is that the feeling of security and focus and a sure and certain future is what keeps the plan going. No need to doubt, or second-guess, or do any of the other things lesser beings do. 

Nope! It’s full steam ahead and no looking sideways. 

Anyhow, my point is that I am not that kind of person. I have always rated low on ambition and initiative. I am too invested in maximizing person autonomy and possibilities to go gangbusters for any plan. 

But I am definitely a dreamer. And when I am following a dream I have come to love, I have all the ambition I could ever need. 

But nobody in my life ever suggested a dream I could fall in love with to me when I was young. There I was with all that intellectual and creative potential but nobody ever even asked me what I planned to do with it all, let along suggested anything. 

Maybe I scared people. I don’t know. 

So I coasted. Even when I finally went to university, I had no actual idea what the hell I wanted to do with my life. 

I mean, I went there with the vague idea that I would be an accoutant but somehow completely failed to sign up for any business courses at all. 

Turns out being super good at something doesn’t make you want it. 

And then I got taken out of my school by selfish parents and went very crazy and got quite sick and only through sheer force of will managed to drag myself out of that state and get to the point where instead of being utterly bugfuck crazy, I was merely severely depressed. 

Aaaand that’s where I have been ever since. 

Part of my depression is that I feel like such a worthless useless loser for not having done anything with my life despite being 45 years old now. 

This is the time of life when healthy people are at the height of their careers and have the kids and the home and the white picket fence and all dat. 

Me…. I got nuthin’.  I am a total loser. 

But that’s stinkin’ thinkin’. That is entirely the wrong way to look at it. I have been judging myself like that for a long time and it has to stop. 

Because here is the truth : I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing, namely recuperating. 

Or even just surviving. No intelligent person would expect any more of me. Society, such as it is, just wants me to try to get healthy again. 

Because I am a very ill man, and nobody expects sick people to perform exactly like healthy people no matter how ill they are. 

So comparing myself to healthy people is absurd. If those people had my issues, they would be in the same boat as I am. They are no better or worse than I am. They are just lucky enough to be healthy. 

So the truth is that I am doing just fine. I am a survivor. I make it through every day despite all the chemical madness in my head and that takes a lot of courage, strength, and force of will. 

And I am doing what I can to get healthy.  I go to therapy no matter what. I take my meds. I tippity tap type my words into this thing every day. And I challenge my depression’s assumptions every chance I get. 

And that’s all I can do. I want to be able to do a whole lot more.  Part of me is still vital and alive and has all the “get out there and prove yourself” instincts that drive healthy people to launch their careers. 

But the cruel and unpalatable truth is that the world of the healthy is not for me. I live in the world of the disabled. That sadly involves a severe curtailing of expectations. 

And as a product of the middle class, lowering expectations is a brutal and agonizing thing to have to do. 

Sometimes, in order to get better, we have to set some of our dreams on fire then watch them burn to the ground. 

I still believe that some day, I will be able to make a living with my creative skills. That’s not the issue. 

But I have to learn to accept that I might never catch up with my cohort. That I may remain a weak and fragile person and will never have the sort of robust engagement with reality that I dream of. 

This might be it. This life I am leading right now.  This might well be as good as it gets for me.  Video games. Sugar free snacks. Hanging with my friends three times a week. Writing this a-here blog thingy every day. 

That might be all I am capable of. All I will ever be capable of. 

And if that thought horrifies me – and it does – then that can be my well of inspiration to get things done. 

And if that’s not enough motivation, that is fine too. 

Because I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. 

I am making it through the day and doing the best I can to get better. 

And that’s all anyone could ever ask of me. 

That’s not actually what I want to talk about tonight, but the phrase just popped into my head and I think it sounds pretty cool so I thought I should record it here.

Truth is, I just woke up from a nap and my mind is pretty blank. I really need to stop falling asleep in the mid-afternoon because then I end up falling asleep when it’s light out and waking up when it’s dark, and that really confuses and disorients me.

And I have enough confusion and disorientation in my life as is. In fact, a lot of the time it feels like chaotic confusion is my natural state and any clarity and stability I have in my mind is the result of a titanic battle with the forces of pandemonium.

It’s like I force myself to be sane by sheer force of will. Sheesh.

No wonder I am so tired all the time!

Right now, I feel unpleasantly floaty, and the room is doing that disturbing thing where it spins very, very slowly around me, speeding up a little when I move my head.

This is a good indication that my sinuses are backed up to the point where it is messing with my inner ear and its delicate balance organs.

Goddamned vertigo. You know I hate it.

Plus there are the usual after effects of smothering in my sleep, affectionately known as sleep apnea. That makes me dizzy too, but in a different way. It also makes me feel like I have been squashed flat like a cartoon character under a steamroller and that I am only just now getting around to slowly reinflating myself.

My life can be really fucking unpleasant sometimes. Ya know? It’s like I live inside a torture chamber that only I can see.

My sleep has been even more disorganized than usual lately. To the point of practically being random. I didn’t get any sleep between midnight and noon today. First I ended up hanging out online with this furry named Luke online till like 9 am, then when I finally went to bed I found I could not sleep a wink.

So I have had maybe four hours of sleep in the last 24. This obviously puts me way behind on sleep and it is definitely going to catch up with me soon.

In fact, the moment I am done blogging, I am going to go back to sleep. I slept through a large chunk of the afternoon and it looks like I will sleep for a big piece of the evening as well. And that’s not good.

My circadian cha-cha is all randomized and my body is terribly confused and that causes a lot of stress and strain on the bodily systems. I would be a lot better off if I followed something like a standard human timetable instead of living nap to nap and never getting any truly deep sleep.

That means it is time to do the one thing I can do to force my system to sleep when it should and that is to take one of my goddamned sleeping pills.

In fact, in retrospect, it is just this kind of sleep chaos that made me want to get sleeping pills in the first place. I was having trouble staying asleep for more than 2 hours and that is very much not good.

You don’t get nearly enough high intensity REM time that way, and what do you know, you end up disoriented, confused, and unhealthy.

And here I am in that same mental state again. Damn it. I wish I had realized this before now but I think I was enjoying abusing sleep to escape stress again too much.

Well fuck that. I need a serious course correction and I need it ASAP. So sometime soon I got to make with the Quetiapine.

And keep it up at least ubntil I develop some kind of regular sleep pattern. Something I can live with, instead of the current state of being totally fucked up.

Dammit, now I have upset myself so much that I need to lay down.

---

Right, so as I was saying, I need to stop using sleep to regulate mood.

Oh wait, that was in a dream. Never mind.

Kidding aside, I really did need to take a break because I was working myself into a state. Specifically, Idaho. Without that break I probably would have made myself quite sick as I had the worst kind of panic attack in my little world, the kind that comes with nausea and cramping from my “nervous stomach”, aka my IBS.

As is, when I woke up, I immediately needed to defecate and it was not a pleasant trip. Strange things happen in my colon when it is upset and one never knows how everything will go.

So to speak.

That means that now,. in addition to my post-sleep symptoms I can add my post-IBS attack symptoms, which include a slight soreness all through my bowels, a feeling of faintness from all the work my body just did moving those big bowel muscles so much, and a general feeling of being drained and depleted.

Life is ever so much fun in this merry old world of ours, isn’t it? Isn’t it though?

Oh well. At least I am venting my more negative emotions some of the time now. As those who know me may know, I am a huge believer in catharsis. Emotions are information and the only way to get rid of them is to express them to someone. Only the will your mind get the “message received” signal and let the emotion go.

We call that letting go “catharsis”, and it is God, or at least redemption.

So I figure as long as I keep getting bettter and better at actually putting my real emotions out there (as opposed to just the cute ones), the better off I will be in the long run. So I got that going for me.

Oh well. Time for me to return to bed and try to mellow out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

That sounds wrong. Let me try again.

What I do doesn’t matter.

One more time :

Whatever I do is fine.

Meh, close enough.

I have been pondering productivity lately and my lack thereof, and it’s really made me realize how harshly I judge myself for my non-productive life.

This, despite being a very ill man.

So I have decided that there are some statement I need to make in order to clear the way for myself in the future.

So here goes :

I am officially excused from all need to produce. Society understands that I am ill and does not expect me to pitch in. All society wants of me is for me to work on getting better. And even then, only when I can. No pressure.

And most importantly, at no point and on no level will I ever be expected to catch up.

My slate is blank. Tabula rasa, baby,. I do not carry a massive debt to society that I can never hope to repay and I have nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to apologize for.

I have nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to apologize for.

Once again, : I have nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to apologize for.

Repeat until believed.

It is perfectly fine if I spend all day playing video games and taking naps. Again, I am a very ill man and nothing more is expected of me.

There is no need to hate myself for only doing what I can.

Logically speaking, that is all anyone can ever do.

And that extends into the future, too. It is perfectly fine if I never become a normal member of society. It’s not ideal but if I don’t make it, it doesn’t make me a bad person.

I will continue to strive. But it’s okay just to survive.

Above all else, I will remember this :

I am wonderful. Magnificent. Downright magical. I am a great person who is sweet and kind and gentle and funny and a joy to be around.

And I don’t need to be anything else.

---

There. Phew! I think that is enough testifying for now. Speaking one’s truth can be mighty tiring, if you’re doing it right.

There is probably more that I need to tell myself – lots more – but I am tired and I feel like I was starting to just spin my wheels and repeat myself.

So that’s enough for now.

What I am trying to do is free myself to simply live my life from this point onward without any worry as to what I am getting done or what I have to show for my time on Earth.

All that matters is my happiness. Everything else is just a means to that end.

Hmmm. Maybe that wasn’t enough after all.

---

I have been sleeping a LOT lately. Or perhaps I should say I’ve been sleeping often lately. I have fallen into an old and less than ideal pattern of being awake for a couple of hours then sleeping for an hour or an hour and a half.

And it’s not hard to see why. It’s to escape the depression. It’s to not have to deal with life at all. It’s to take advantage of sleep as a final refuge from life.

By living in this tight sleep cycle, even my waking hours are somewhat dreamlike. It helps a lot when it comes to keeping my anxiety levels down but it is ultimately not sustainable and only contributes to my feeling of unreality.

What I really want is to be wide awake and happy. I don’t want to have to tune most of reality out just to make it through the day.

And I find myself getting nostalgic for a time when I was healthier. Like when I was going to Kwantlen or VFS.

---

I just had to take yet ANOTHER nap. Sigh.

Anyhow, nostalgia. The person who went to Kwantlen and VFS seems alien to me now. How did I ever have that much energy and verve and will to live? How could I ever have had that much hope?

Because knowing what I know now, I am pretty sure I would not sign up for that trip again. All I got out of it in the end is a “diploma” from VFS that is worthless because no teacher would recommend me for anything,.

Oh, and around $25,000 in debt I have no way of repaying.

So when I try to think back of when I was going to VFS and had such high hopes for my future as a TV writer, all I feel is choking waves of bitterness.

There’s probably some other form of education I could try. Something that would lead to some form of being a therapist springs to mind. I could try to convince the province to lend me the moolah to take some kind of three or four year counseling program.

Yeah right. A lot of people start their careers when they are almost 50. And even if I did it, I would still be the weird socially alien kind of scary hairy dude whom nobody likes, so for all I know, people would be just as eager to get rid of me at the end too.

Besides, despite my earlier positive messages, I am still pretty depressed. So I am in no shape to ponder putting weight on that limb yet.

Is there such a thing as physical therapy for the soul?

I suppose that’s called religion. Or at least, meditation.

At least I managed to reach the Happy Squirting Time when I was masturbating recently. That makes it like…. one time in thirty?

Oh well. The journey always feels good.

And I need to learn to be less goal oriented anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

AND NOW, SUPER SNAZZY BONUS CONTENT!

Whatever The Fuck This Is Now Presents :

Aliens Trying (And Failing) To Relate To Humans :

“So obviously, you then impaled them with your proboscis. ”
“Oh no, that must have caused a lot of pain in your…. testicles?”
“I would have been all, ‘Like you can secrete anyting better!”
“Wait, I’m confused…..when did you eat the placenta?”
“If you want, I could help you decide which of your children to eat. “

And yet again, I feel a bit better today than I did yesterday.

Managed a bit of crying, which probably helped. Not much, just a few minutes of sobsat a time, but it is definite progress. If I keep trying, maybe I can stretch and massage that emotional aperture till it gets used to opening on demand.

Why yes, just like an anus! You’re so smart.

When I was younger, there were periods where I could do that. And I was somewhat proud of the fact, which I suppose is typically male of me.

Well, unless you pussies, I have the self-mastery and discipline to be able to cry when I need to, without any fear of judgment. Which means I’m BETTER than you!

Sadly, that is exactly how the male mind works.

Sadly, though, those waterworks need to be used and maintained or they rust up and seize on a fella. Or in my case, freeze up.

Depression can freeze anything if you let it.

I’ve been working on trying to disconnect my self-worth from concepts of productivity. I should not be judging myself so harshly on what I “get done”. All that leads to is even less productivity because now I am too depressed to do anything besides throw myself into my video games even harder to escape.

If artistic productivity, including the kind I get paid for, is truly my goal, then the method to achieve that is to be as kind and forgiving and loving to myself as possible.

After all, flowers bloom in the warmth of the sun, not the cold of night.

So once more, things circle back to being a hell of a lot nicer to myself. I have fallen back into hating myself after getting at least partly out of the habit for a little while, and I want to get back to loving myself again.

But it’s clearly a lot more complicated than just “hey, stop doing that!” can solve. I tried it that way and what ended up happening was that the negative self-judging emotions accumulated. And when they finally broke through and expressed themselves, it actually felt good to start hating myself again.

So clearly I have to deal with those emotions, not just suppress them. I have a lot of latent rage and, as a depressive, I am accustomed to taking it out on myself.

I truly am my own abuser.

Ergo, in order to save myself from myself, I would have to find a way to externalize all that goddamned anger, and that has been one of my large assortment of betes noir for a very long time now.

Seriously. Look it up. I have been talking about that same thing in this blog for ages.

It’s just so hard to let the anger out into the world when I am still so afraid of it. Afraid of what it might do, or rather, make me do. I can feel its urge to despoil and destroy seething in the back room of my consciousness and it frightens me. I don’t want to become the monster it wants me to be. I refuse to let that happen.

But there is a very good chance that this entire notion of Monster Mike is actually just a bullshit illusion my depression creates to protect itself. It knows that healthy expression of emotion will have the same effect on it that sunlight does on Dracula, and so it creates these nightmare visions of horrible behaviour to scare me out of trying it.

And that’s not even counting the fundamental truth that it is precisely the kind of emotional suppression that my depression thrives on that causes the kind of emotional imbalance that the depression then uses to justify more suppression.

It’s a nasty cycle and the only way out is to let that damned emotion out somehow.

And I have been getting better at it over time. I let at least some of the steam out now. I can vent from time to time, usually in this space. It is by no means proportional to the size of the job but it is still a hell of a lot better than no venting at all.

And the more I let that steam out, the less crazy I feel and the less dangerous letting more of it out seems.

It used to be that I couldn’t even imagine opening the floodgates without imagining myself exploding in an orgy of brutal bloody violence directed at total strangers that would only end when the police shot me dead.

Now, what I picture is merely me being a total prick to a lot of people as I vent a lot of anger verbally by striking out at all that offends or annoys me without restraint.

Still not good, but definitely way better than a massacre.

So who knows. Maybe if I keep working away on finding healthy and relatively non-destructive ways to release my rage, I will eventually get to the point where all I worry about are the same sort of attacks of irritibility that are considered normal in others.

That’s still the paradox to me. I know, in my head, that most of the world accepts that sometimes people are in cranky moods and doesn’t make a huge deal of it. Just finds ways of dealing with it without branding said person some kind of horrible social criminal because it’s understood that everyone feels that way sometimes.

And I understand that and accept it. I even admire it. It seems very sane to me.

But when I try to apply that thought to myself, everything falls apart. I am far too keenly aware of my emotional effect on others to let myself just be a prick sometimes.

My therapist thinks I don’t give people enough credit for being able to handle what I might dish out, and he is probably right. My sense of my power to harm people with my anger is probably vastly exaggerated.

But it might not be. I have a lot of power I don’t use. Verbal power, emotional insight, and so on. By those powers combined, I could really hurt people.

And that’s something I just can’t accept.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

The trend continues : I feel a little better than I did yesterday.

Even my unpleasant sleepy afternoon was less unpleasant and less sleepy than before. So there’s that, at least. Whatever the fuck it is I am going through, it’s going well.

I have a theory on that, actually. Of course. It’s a bit tricky to explain, so bear with me.

Basically, over the last year or so, the part of my mind where I store emotions I am trying to dodge has been slowly but inexorably shrinking. As this happens, my ability to avoid dealing with things shrinks with it. I no longer have these vast spaces within me in which to hide. I used to keep everything out of focus and blurry in order to keep from seeing things I didn’t want to see, but now everything is in HD and sharply focused.

The result is my current emotional state : depressed. Without the ability to sideline unpleasant emotions, I now have no choice but to actually process all my bad mojo and negative emotion and the result is my current state of depression.

I think that is why this particular depressive period is hanging around for so long. I have a hell of a lot of emotions to process that means feeling them.

And I definitely feel like something is happening within me. Something big. Every day of sadness and despair gets me that much closer to something and it is this sense of progress that helps me the most when the darkness is closing in.

In fact, on one level, I don’t even want to feel better. I am getting something important done with all this sadness. Leave me to it.

It gets awfully cold in his heart of mind, though. Also a part of the process : I have a lot of emotional coldness from decades of isolation to deal with.

That glacier sitting on my heart is going to make things very cold as I push iceberg after iceberg out of me and into the great big sea to float away forevermore.

I call it “birthing my ice”. Because I’m strange.

I have been so damned lonely in my icy prison for a very long time. When I was raped at the age of 4, a wall of ice descended between me and others, and I have been all alone on my side of the wall ever since.

And that’s kind of a big deal. I have been emotionally handicapped for most of my life. There could be all kinds of love and affirmation and validation on the other side of that wall an I would never feel it.

And I am forced to ask myself a brutally tough question : how much of my sense of being ignored and neglected is real and how much is an illusion created by this inability of emotional signals to make it across the vast void within?

I have heavily invested in the idea of myself as a victim of emotional mistreatment by others. And it’s true that I was not treated well by others, including people who were supposed to be there to look out for me and protect me.

But the day to day loneliness could, in part, be due to this emotional isolation caused by a reaction to a severe emotional trauma at an early age.

And it’s a hell of a thing to realize that your interpretation of your own past might be inaccurate. Perhaps I was unreachable. Adrift on an ice floe, there was no way for anyone except perhaps a highly trained child psychologist to reach me, and so those who tried soon gave up and got out of my cold sad world as soon as possible.

---

I had to lay down for a bit.

The word ‘incommunicado’ just popped into my head. That is what I have been for all these years. Not in the simple and straightforward sense of not being able to be reached for communication, of course. I am communicative as fuck.

No, I am incommunicado in the more complex sense of being there but not really there. Or not ALL there, as they used to say.

I can be sitting there in front of you, live and in the flesh in living Technicolor, and I am chatting in my usual lively way, and yet in a very real sense I am not there at all. I am a million miles away on my icy little planetoid and simulating being there with you via some kind of telepresence system.

Perhaps I would be better off if I was not so good as dissembling. I hide my problems from others so well that I never attract the sort of nurturing I need.

But I can’t stop hiding my problems from others until I stop hiding them from myself. I would much rather be the person I pretend to be than the person I really am, and while I am pretending, I can fool myself into thinking that’s true.

I have trouble even imagining being any other way. If I stopped pertending and simply expressed my emotional state all the time, I would be pretty goddamned unpleasant to be around. I would essentially be a lunatic, either hyper irritable or hysterical with fear nearly all the time and ten times dangerous because I would use all my verbal and emotional gifts to inject my madness into others, like Hamlet does to poor Ophelia.

Or is it Cordelia? I can never remember.

And my connection with others is slender enough with me doing my best to be as lovable as I know how to be. I do what I can to give people reasons to put up with me. If I didn’t do that, nobody would want me around at all.

I can’t afford to be unpleasant to be around. I have zero faith that anyone would stick with me through that kind of shit.

I know I wouldn’t.

So I am doomed to go through life wearing a mask of my own face. One so convincing that even I don’t know what is real and what is artifice.

And that’s exactly how I want it.

I will talk to you nice poeople again tomorrow,

 

Thankfully, not at the same time.

Another rough afternoon of bad sleep punctuated by brief, almost dream-like interludes of semi-wakeful pissing.

The whole deal makes the act of urination loom strangely and uncomfortable large in my mind at the moment.

I find myself contemplating my place in the water cycle. The water I drink to stay hydrated was once water vapor in a cloud. When conditions were right, that water coalesced into raindrops and fell on the land. Some of that rain fell in the local reservoir. That water was filtered and treated to make it safe for human consumption. When I turned the tap to fill my glass, some of that treated water flowed from a long distance away to give me the water I need to live. I then tipped back my glass and drank the water, which ended up in my stomach then into my intestines and thence into every cell of my body, where it flushed away the waste products of metabolism kept the interior of my body and all its membranes moist and supple.

After it has done this important work, the water, now transformed into urine by the kidney, pooled in my bladder awaiting release.

And then my sleepy self shambled to the bathroom, pointed my penis at the bowl, and released that urine. Once released, it ended up mingling with the water in the toilet, which then got flushed into the sewage system of my town.

From there it went to the sewage treatment plant, where it was once more scrubbed clean of all impurities, and released into the ocean. Once in the ocean, it can, in time, evaporate and become water vapour in a cloud once more.

And every living animal is part of that enormous cycle. Right now, billions of individual acts of urination are releasing water back into the system. Penises and vaginas worldwide are united in this simple and natural act.

It’s all quite elegant and even majestic, from the right point of view. We think of ourselves as isolated individuals but in this we are all connected by a great and intricate river that flows through us all.

That’s true of shitting as well, although the process is a great deal more complex. Still, I take some comfort as a humanist and as a human that no matter how important, powerful, rich, famous, or successful someone is, they, like the rest of us, have to spend some time on the ceramic throne doing the single most disgusting and lowly thing we humans do on a regular basis.

Even the Pope must poop.

I also find it amusing how universal the hierachy of bathroom needs is. The rule is simple and inviolable : pee is bad, but poop is SO MUCH WORSE.

I bet there is not a human being alive or that has ever lived that saw things the other way around. Nobody in the history of human has ever said “thank god it was only shit!”. There is nobody who would rather step in shit than get pee on them.

It even extends into what can be depicted in the media. The media is fairly casual about depicting male urination as long as the golden (heh) rule is observed : you can see the stream but not the source.

In other words, you can show that telltale arc of water but not the penis it is coming from. Clearly there is a hierarchy there too : depicting urine flowing is not nearly as “bad” as showing an actual penis.

Female urination is harder to depict without showing the goods. And, in this patriarchal culture, everything to do with women’s “down there’ activities is considered more taboo than the simple innocence of having a wee on a wall.

Yes folks, the culture we live in is even sexist as fuck in the bathroom. Male urination is okay-ish,. female urination HECK NO.

I mean, take this little fellow :

There he is, adorable little pecker in hand, whizzing away. And what a whizz  it is! He’s been whizzing since he was constructed in the 17th century. That is something like a 500 year pee, and he’s still going strong.

Surely he must be almost done by now!

Still, I understand. I’m 45 and the old pipes are getting narrow. So sometimes it feels like it’s taking me 500 years to piss as well.

Anyhow, my point is that the whole world is familiar with little Pis and his thousands of imitators. It is largely considered a symbol of simple childhood innocence, even in this age where taking a picture of your little boy doing the same thing could get you arrested and ruin your life.

But don’t worry about him being lonely up there. He has family!

Including a sister. So don’t feel bad, ladies, somewhere in Brussels a sweet little girl is enjoying a nice long wee as well.

And of course, they have a dog. But his pissing is only implied. I guess a dog does not rate bering hooked up to the water and given his own little shrine.

It’s the boy everyone knows, though, and I don’t think that is a coincidence. Somehow (in other words, PATRIARCHY) a little boy peeing is this universal symbol of innocence, whereas most males would not even know what a urinating female looks like.

Well enough is enough! I call upon all female humans to start showing the male humans what it looks like when you pee! Invite them into the bathroom with you! Stage public pee-ins! Let the streets run gold with your outrage! DEMAND EQUAL PEE.

Okay, not really.

But it would be really freaking funny.

AAaanyhow. Wow, I totally did not set out to talk about bathroom functions for an entire blog entry. But it turns out I have a lot of thoughts on the subject.

And I didn’t even touch upon the metaphorical and symbolic natures of our two main eliminatory functions, and all the deep and complicated ways our eliminatory instincts get writ large upon the world in unexpected ways.

Some of which are quite dire.

Oh well, it’s a start.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.