Here’s a question that has perplexed me since I was a child : why is romantic love considered the one thing it is “safe” to write songs about?

Because like it says up there in the title, love isn’t safe. It is, in fact, one of the most dangerous things out there, at least emotionally.

Like the wise poet Gordon Sumner said,

Only love can heal
But love can break your heart

Sting, in the police song “message in a bottle”

What I am saying is that romantic love is powerful, unpredictable, and has the power to make or break your spirit in an instant.

And yet, we sing about it like it’s the most routine, boring thing ever.

I think the key here is that while love is dangerous, it’s also ubiquitous. Nearly every single human being will experience it in their life^[1].

And when you think of it, that’s pretty remarkable. It’s amazing that, despite all the fuss about our higher minds and their capacities for logic and reason, Mother Nature still ensures the continuation of the species by pairing nearly every human with another human and giving them the urge to make babies.

Sure, it starts off as just sex, but eventually, most heterosexual couples will want something more in their life, and will want to take the next step.

And the thing is, Mother Nature doesn’t give a shit whether you want to fall and love or not. Hence the comedy trope of young people insisting they will never get married, and yet, most of them will.

These instincts are so strong within us that they even pair us up when Mother Nature has also made us homosexual. Us homos are clearly not going to continue the species and yet., we pair up, build homes, make said homes cozy little nests, and get cats.

Or if you’re a lesbian, dogs.

And if you’re bisexual…. I dunno. Ferrets?

Anyhoo. Time to drag myself back to the goddamned topic.

Because romantic love and all the rest happen to nearly everyone, that means the subject is normal. And I think that is the key here. Nothing normal can be scary for most people, no matter what the actual threat level might be.

That’s why people who live in places with highly deadly flora and fauna that would scare the bejesus out of anyone from a safer place can be so totally calm about it.

“So you have to remember to check your shoes for scorpions or you’ll die. So what? It’s not that hard to do. ”

And don’t think this is limited to exotic places with telegenic threats. Right now, the United States is experiencing a brutal cold snap. My friend who lives in Minnesota told me they had temperatures as low as -27 C there this week, and that’s before figuring in the wind chill factor.

He also said there’s a lot of people from Somalia in his region, and a lot of people from the sub-India countries like Bangaladesh, and we were wondering what on Earth those poor people must be thinking of their new homeland.

Presumably, to them, this is a nightmare, and they must marvel at the aplomb of the native Minnesotans going about their business like this is a normal thing and not, say, freaking out because the air is trying to kill them.

In my own case, I come from the Maritime region of Canada, and that meants that in winter the snow eventually piles up to at least hip height and sometimes all the way up to shoulder height.

To me, that is perfectly normal. You wear sensible layers of clothing under your parka and get used to digging out the driveway every other day. No problem.

But to someone from here on the Wet Coast, where it hardly ever snows, it would seem like a new Ice Age had formed. And they would wonder at all us native Maritimers going about our lives like it’s no big deal.

Dammit, the topic escaped me again.

My point is that very dangerous things can seem safe when they are normal. Hence romantic love being a safe topic. You can sing all about how love ripped your soul into confetti and ruined your life and nobody even takes that as a serious warning.

It’s just a love song. Those things happen in love songs.

Myself, like I say in the footnote, I have not experienced the miracle of romantic love yet. In fact, when I was younger, I used to wonder if I was even capable of it.

After all, I had never felt romantically attracted to anyone.

But of course, that was when I was closeted, and had to clamp down on all such feelings lest they lead me into serious trouble.

Once I came out of that closet (thanks, the Internet!), it became abundantly clear that I was perfectly capable of it.

It’s just that my social isolation means I don’t ,meet new people, like,ever, and without that you stand little chance of finding your lifemate.

What socialization I do get, it’s through being Fruvous on Tapestries, and I learned how not to fall in love online a long time ago after getting burned many times by people who seemed as into me as I was into them right up until the point when they introduced me to their mate and said “I think you two would really get along!”.

Fuck that. I don’t share, okay? For me love means totally devoting myself to someone, and you can’t totally devote yourself to more than one person.

It’s logically impossible.

That said, there is a certain someone on Tapestries of whom I am growing quite fond, and there is an alarm going off in my head that says “Say something to him about it before he slips through your fingers like the others!”.

But it’s so hard to do. For all my eloquence, I have enormous difficulty when it comes to telling someone I am into them romantically. I am so afraid that will make them reject me and I will have lose what I have with them for no good reason.

And it’s so much easier to just let things continue as they are.

Not better. Just easier.

But I am going to have to do something soon. He’s not necessarily the easiest person to get along with – it’s no coincidence that his fursona is a porcupine. But I really like him and I think he’s fond of me.

That’s no surprise. I am easy to like. I’m the most popular puppy in the dog pound.

But nobody ever seems to want to take me home for keeps.

I will talk to you nice peopl again tomorrow.

.

Time for another go at the question of what the fuck I am doing with my life and what the ENORMOUS fuck I want to be doing with it.

It’s easy to say what I want to be doing with it. Writing for TV. Took a whole degree in it and everything. Said degree means I am actually qualified to do it.

But that doesn’t mean shit because of all the stuff between that dream gig and me that I am currently unable to overcome.

What I am doing, of course, is watching the sands of my hourglass trickle away while I spend all the precious seconds of my life playing fucking video games.

And I can’t stop. And not just because I am addicted to them and crave them when I am away from them. That’s certainly bad but it’s not the true enforcement mechanism of the addiction and it’s not the real reason I can’t stop.

The real reason I can’t stop is that if I did, I would have to go back to trying to figure out what the fuck to do with my time, and the thought of that terrifies me.

See, the addiction to video games has saved me from having to face the yawning existential void of wondering what the fuck to do. I don’t have to face the infinite corridor with infinite doors any more. I know exactly what I will be doing with my time.

Playing fucking video games.

Without that, I am lost. I lost what decision making chutzpah I had when the addiction took over, and now all I can do is sit in front of this computer and play Dragon Age Origins and Eternal all goddamned day while get older and sicker and closer to death.

Of course, there’s lots of things I could be doing. That’s the problem. I have the freedom to do whatever I want, and I don’t even know what that is. I have no specific direction I am looking to go in, just dreams of jobs I would love to have but don’t know how to get – or worse, I know how to get but I am not capable of the steps involved.

It’s easier to pretend not to know. Better to be confused than cowardly.

It all comes back to the id, doesn’t it? Whatever it is that lets people overcome indecision, choose a course of action, then pursue it with vigor and determination lies somewhere in the deep dark forest of my ill used id, and I won’t be able to escape the gravity well of my tiny cell until I have a better connection with it.

The id is the engine. The ego is merely the driver.

At least my discontent with my life as it is has been growing stronger lately. That’s a good sign. That frustration with my live as it is right now is the only force within me capable of actually making me do shit instead of just thinking of things I could do then putting them in my “wouldn’t that be nice” file and forgetting all about them.

Because to do something about them means actually having to do something, and I am far too scared to do much of anything at all.

Doing things is for people who do not constantly feel like they are dangling over the edge of insanity and mental oblivion, barely hanging on by their fingertips, with their guts hanging out of the incision they used when they took his heart away.

Folks say it’s a nice heart, through. I’ve heard good things about it.

It’s this constant gnawing insecurity that makes me freak out like a cornered fox in a fox hunt at the very thought of doing things to improve my life. Between the insecuity and the thousands of shrieking possibilities that raise their voice like a satanic chorus every time I try to decide what to do, it’s no wonder that I remain immobile.

School was great because it provided structure for me. I didn’t have to decide what to do. School told me what to do. It was all so clear and easy to understand. And because I had that kind of structure, I could enjoy the time I had left over from school stuff as genuine leisure time and not this never ending wasteland of time and ennui.

But I still don’t want to go back to school. I’d feel like a total idiot if I did. I have a degree (sort of). I am trained for a job. I should be pursuing that job.

And the odds are that if I went to school and got another something in something, I would still be unable to pursue a career in it for the same reasons I can’t pusue the one I am actually qualified for.

It wouldn’t change anything. Just make things even more futile.

There is no getting around it. This cell of mine is made entirely of my mental illness, and there is no escape until I am a great deal more sane.

I have come a very long way, but there is so much further to go.

What is worse is that there is no clear path to sanity. It’s not like an infection, where you just do what the doctor says and get better over time.

There are no antibiotics for insanity.

All I can do is keep taking my meds and keep going to therapy and keep writing away my feelings on this blog and hope that, some day, enough of the glacier that rests squarely atop my heart will have melted to let me start up my engine and live again.

I’ve died so many times, in so many ways, from so many things over the years. Had my heart crushed in ways I didn’t even understand by people who bore me no ill will but had no idea what their words and emotions could do to me.

It’s the callous, not the malice, that has hurt me the most.

That’s why I have led such a cold, cold life.

I don’t even know how to ask to be let in any more.

All I can do is look in from the outside. And sigh.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Who the hell am I, anyway?\

It took a significant act of will to ask “who” and not “what”. I have asked what the hell I am for decades and I think it had led me in the wrong direction.

I ask what I am because I have never met another person like me. A lot of nerds and intellectuals (but I repeat myself) end up feeling the same way – that’s why so many of us have wondered if we are actual aliens at least once.

But we’re not aliens. Just alienated. Humans made to feel inhuman.

And that’s the fundamental answer to the question of what I am.

I’m a human being, with all that entails. And I have the same right to love and peace and acceptence and human connection as anyone else. I am not some strange inhuman monster struggling to fit into human society despite lacking some key fundamental ingredient, like my robot with the busted antenna.

I’m a human being, being human just like the other 7 billion of us.

It’s amazing how good it feels to type that. I think I need to remind myself of my own humanity as often as I can because I have felt extremely isolated from the rest of us crazy naked beach apes ever since the second half of the first grade.

But nothing that happens to a human can make them no longer human. The fact that I fell into a negative pattern that resulted in my receiving very little socialization during key phases of my childhood and hence ended up a socially retarded adult does not make me one whit less human than anyone else.

Something something Donald Trump.

And now, a poem. See you after the cut.

The many meanings of “okay”

“How are you?”

“Oh, I’m okay. “

“But what does that mean?”

Well….

It might mean, “I’m terrible and want you to go away”

It might mean, “I’m miserable in ways I don’t know how to explain”

It might mean, “Bad, but I’ve been worse, so… okay?”

It might mean, “Suicidal, but I don’t want to hurt you with my pain”

It might mean, “I can’t tell you because you will not understand”

It might mean, “I’d like to tell you but I feel far too exposed”

It might mean, “How can I tell you when I live on shifting sands?”

It might mean, “I can’t say because I am feeling too enclosed”

It might mean, “I would tell you, but where would I begin?”

It might mean, “I can’t hear you over the chaos in my head”

It might mean, ” I love you, but I don’t let anybody in”

It might mean, “I can’t tell because I feel too fucking dead”

It might even mean that I am actually okay

But if I were a betting man, I wouldn’t bet the way

Right then. Where was I? Oh right, being human.

So the question of “what” is resolved. I’m a human being like any other.

But the question of who the hell I am remains very much open. I suppose that’s the question every human being must face sooner or later.

Not everyone has the sort of fluid sense of identity I do, however. My fundamental challenge before I can begin to answer the question of who I am is that I feel like I am a million different people from one day to the next, so how do I choose?

Which one of my many forms and modes is “the real me”? Is there even such a thing as a real me? Perhaps there has never been much more to me than an act of fiction.

But who’s writing it?

Someone who wants to stay in the dark, obviously. Someone who cloaks himself in multiple layers of illusion in order to keep his real self hidden. Someone who wants the illusions to be real so he convinces you they are real.

And yet, they are still just illusions, and can be discarded when necessary in order to keep that fragile eminence grise at the center safe.

Safe from what? There’s no external threats. Must be the demons within then. Either way, it’s a simple defense mechanism : when the predator grabs you, you shed the outer layer of your skin and slip free.

But who is it that escapes? If the layers are so easily discarded, they can’t be a fundamental part of who I am as a person.

Therefore the question remains : who is that scared little animal inside it all?

He’s the mastermind behind it all. He is the one who orchestrates the whole stinking show just to keep attention away from him. He is the man of the shadows, pulling strings and adjusting variables in order to achieve a result.

But that desired result is a product of paranoia and a resulting obsession with safety. It can be placated but it can never be truly satisfied because there is no such thing as total safety even under its harsh regime.

And there are worse things than getting hurt. Like hurting yourself through starvation and isolation and brutal, thoughtless self-denial.

When the attitude is, “everything is bad so it’s fine to reject all of life without even thinking about it, as a reflex” then you are in a very bad place.

A place I am in the process of leaving. The road out is hard but the reward is greater freedom so it’s a road worth taking.

The humanity in me isn’t dead. It’s just frozen. It will hurt to thaw it out but I would rather feel a deep and terrible aching than nothing at all.

There are things far worse than pain. And when you realize that, you have taken the first step towards maturity and good mental health because now you know that some things are worth the pain.

Life is suffering, as the Buddhists say. Attempts to prevent all suffering in your life are doomed to failure.

If you can stand a little pain, you’re way ahead in life, is what I am saying.

Now go out there and get hurt.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I almost never talk politics here. Not sure why except that I prefer to keep this space as personal and intimate as possible, and politics takes away from that.

But I can’t think of a single thing in my usual wheelhouse to write about at this moment, and so I am going to talk politics and world affairs until something more apropos occurs to me, or until I hit my word limit, whichever comes first.

Besides. We live in interesting times. The kind that future historians will study and debate endlessly because the story is so horrifying and absurd, and will no doubt have ramifications for the future coming out the ying yang.

Like the Watergate era with a lobotomy.

Myself, I am enjoying the heck out of watching Trump’s ship burn down to the waterline and sink slowly into an inky morass. Sure, it’s not exactly good for America – that shutdown shit was crazytown even for Trump – but now that it is over and his leadership has been fatally wounded by his caving in to the evil forces of logic, reason, common sense, and basic human decency, I can resume thoroughly enjoying the non stop schadenfreude buffet slash orgy that the Trump White House has become since the mid term elections swept the Democrats into power in the House.

The House of Reprentatives, that is. Whose members are called congresspeople. Even though Congress is the House PLUS the Senate.

I am telling you, nothing about the American system makes any goddamned sense

Meanwhile, across the pond, Teresa May continues to be the Kim Campbell of the UK. Like our dear Kim (technically Canada’s first female PM), Teresa May is a nice but fundamentally dull person entirely unsuited to the role of Prime Minister who only got the role because the office had become so goddamned polluted by that time that only an idiot would take on the job of cleaning up the collosal mess left by the supernatural level incompetence of the previous male PM.

I have to admit, I was tres surprised when, after her Brexit plan was shot down with great vigor and vitriolic vehemence in the House of Commons, she somehow survived a vote of no confidence.

That means that a lot of the people in her own party who hated her plan so much they voted against it nevertheless want her to stay in power and try to fix things.

Seems almost cruel, really. I can only assume that none of her Tory cronies want to have to do the job themselves and even the dimmest of them must understand that if there was an election now, they would lose absolutely everything.

After all, they started the whole bloody thing.

And when I say everything, I mean everything. I will always cherish my memories of the night Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives lost all but two seats, and those two were both held by politicans so beloved by their constituents that they could have run for the Purple Elephant Penis Party and still won.

Back to Trump. (It always comes back to Trump. )

I think impeachment is a real possibility now. Previous to the shutdown, I would have agreed with the general feeling that impeachment was impossible because Mitch “The Bitch” McConnell, corrupt bastard that he is, would never even let an impeachment motion go to a vote on the Senate floor.

But Trump threw Mitch under the bus multiple times, and Mitch, reports suggest, is super goddamned pissed off about it. Not only that, but as the shutdown lingered on and became extremely unpopular even amongst Republicans, it was Mitch’s bitch ass in the dunking booth as every GOP Senator and their girlfriend’s dog hollering for Mitch to Do Something About The Situation.

So he did. Rumour has it he’s the one who really gave Trump an earful on multiple occasions in the days leading up to the end of the shutdown.

In fact, Mitch the Chinless Wonder might actually be single-handedly responsible for the shutdown ending. So, props for that, you obscene homonculus.

So Mitch knows he can kick Trump’s ass if he has to, and by the primitive reptile-brain rules of moron conservatives (but I repeat myself), that means he can’t respect Trump any more and desires to see him replaced by a stronger leader.

And that means Mitch might decide to let that motion to remove Trump from office go through to a vote after all.

After all, it’s not like our Parliamentary system, where the only way to take down the PM is to take down their party and force an election.

All that would happen is that Pence would take over. From the point of view of reptillian Reptard like Mitch the Bitch, that’s perfectly fine.

Pence would have to be way easier to work with and way less embarrassing than Trump. I mean, how could he not be?

The bar for that is set so low the bottom of it sticks out into China.

Impeachment might also be the only way to save the Republican Party from total oblivion. Remember, Mulroney was so toxic that his party, the Progressive Conservatives, ceased to be. It died after a long lingering illness.

So yeah. I see impeachment and subsequent removal from office as a real possibility, and the only thing that could stop it for sure would be Trump resigning.

And I am pretty sure that is what he would do the minute it became clear that he was going to actually answer questions about, like, SO MANY THINGS.

Apparently, if you’re a billionaire and incredibly spoiled (but I repeat myself), and senile but in denial about it, you stop thinking about whether something is illegal or not and do all kinds of illegal shit without covering your tracks at all because you have genuinely forgotten that bad things like being arrested can ever happen to you.

So it’s a real horse race between all the many, many. MANY illegal and otherwise shady things he has done as to which one will actually be the thing that brings him down.

The easy money is on the Russia stuff, of course, because treason. But honestly, it could be a lot of other things too.

I would hate to be Robert Mueller right now. How do you keep up with it all?

Well that’s my words for today, folks.

I promise to go back to my endless navel gazing tomorrow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been contemplating my near pathological inability to multitask and its deeper implications today, and thought I would share.

Because it goes a lot deeper than being bad at mundane chores that require a little multitasking. My hyper focus oriendted mind is what makes me miss most of the world, as counterintuitive as that might seem.

To start off, we have to remember that by default, I am entirely focused on the world in my head. That is my base mode. It’s the sort of capacity one develops during the hours and hours of stultifying boredom I had to endure in school.

They made no attempts to challenge me.

This inner focus zealously guards its monopoly on my mental resources, and usually only allots the absolute bare minimum amount of attention to any but the most absording and stimulating of tasks, and that’s pretty much everything except things like reading or playing a video game or writing.

Even watching TV is not stimulating enough for me any more, and if I can do it at all, it is only while I am eating and preferably also with friends.

It hurts to say that, because TV raised me. I feel so disloyal!

Oh, there’s one other thing that can hold my attention : good conversation. Like the conversations I have with my friends.

Other than that, everything I do, I do on a severe austerity basis. And even then, I sometimes end up very confused because those hungry inner processes of my mind have just dumped my working memory and it’s like I just woke up.

That’s fucked up, man.

Anyhow, the way this connects with my lack of multitasking is that it does not leave any mental CPU cycles for noticing things. My active conscious window into the world is alway very tightly focused on whatever it is I am doing, and so if something changes in my environment, I won’t notice unless it is very attention-grabbing.

And even then, maybe not. I walked right past a house fire without noticing once. People could not believe it. How could I miss a HOUSE BEING ON FIRE?

I got a lot going on in my head, okay?

And it’s also a defense against the world. The world stays out there. I stay in here. In my mind, things can be as quiet and predictable and cerebral as I want.

It’s out there that I find unpleasant.

Now if this inner focus was just some kind of absentminded professor lovable quirk, then it would be no big deal. Like my mother says, I’m her little dreamer, walking around with my head in the clouds all the time.

But it goes further than that because the human mind needs sensory input. That’s why people risk losing their minds when they go into a sensory deprivation tank. Without sensory stimulation, vital parts of the mind go numb, or worse, the brain generates random signals just to keep them alive.

That’s where hallucinations would come in. Luckily. I don’t have those. Much.

This lack of stimulus effect expresses itself in me as numbness to the world. Why? Because like a prisoner in solitary confinement, my environment never changes.

And one of the basic facts of neurology is that repeated stimuli are muted by our nervous system. That’s more or less the entire basis for getting used to things.

So I live in a very unreal world. The sensory stimulation I get from my environment as I sit in front of this goddamned computer is effectively zero. I have come as close as is humanly possible to being just a brain on the Internet.

Which is a freaky thought.

The only significant sensory inputs I get are from the computer itself. Audio and visual, and none of it as richly stimulating as even a very boring real thing.

It’s all mental stimulation. All the time, every day. And while I like to think I have a strong and well-developed mind, the rest of me is starving to death.

It’s a trap I have fallen into due to my anxiety and depression. I isolate myself from the world in other to avoid stirring up my adrenaline and hence my anxiety. But that’s a very severe cure that is most likely worse than the disease.

As a result of this isolation, I have become accustomed to very low physical stimulation levels, and therefore even quite mild stimuli can seem like too much to me.

And then, bing goes that goddamned anxiety and I am freaking out over nothing.

Another problem with this deep inner focus is that I never get the active sensory feedback I need in order to become less of a klutz. People are supposed to learn how to navigate their world and do what needs to be done by doing it, more or less, and I have isolated myself from that kind of learning both because of anxiety and because my depression, playing tapes from my childhood, tell me I can’t do anything except make things worse by trying so I should never try to learn new skills.

Hence, I am a maladroit extaordinaire. All it would have taken was one adult with the patience and tenacity to make me try something over and over again until I got it right in order to build my confidence in myself, but between my stubbornness and their apathy, it never happened.

And at this rate, it never will. Le sigh.

But the most worrying thing about this deep inner focus and the thick walls between me and reality that it supports is that it cuts me off from emotional inputs as well.

There are people who love me and care about me a lot and I don’t feel it. I know it and I beleive it, but I don’t feel it. At all.

I am just too numb. I want to feel it, I crave the warmth of human contact in all forms, but there is a thick callous between me and the world that was designed to help me cope with loneliness by tuning out the lack of signal that causes it.

But the cost was far too high. It’s so very cold in this heart of mine. The sunlight never makes it through. I am a strange and frozen beast that knows no mate.

I can think. I am very good at thinking. If it can be done by speaking and/or thinking, I am your man.

But it all comes from a cold dark place where I am all alone, forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Gonna go cashez le cheque today.

This will require an entirely solo trip out into the Big Bad World, and that is always something special for me. Normally I only ever leave with Joe or Felicity in thjeir nice comfy cars where I don’t have to be socially exposed to others until we get to the restaurant or whatever.

Doing stuff All By Myself…

… is an entirely different teapot of tadpoles. And while it is more of a challenge to get my ass out that door, it also tends to be quite rewarding.

It usually results in my feeling much better because I no longer feel so trapped in this little life of mine and I have gotten some fresh air into my lunch instead of the stale gross air I breathe in this filthy room of mine, and in general I have escaped my cell and gotten to roam free for a while.

And I always end up thinking,”you know, I should do that more often!” After all, if it has such solid benefits, why not do it all the time?

Because depression. That’s why.

I am only going to be able to do it today because I have no choice. If I don’t cash my cheque today, things will get rather fimamcially dicey for me real soon. I only have $25 and change to my name right now and that will not cover my expenses for the weekend. Not by a long shot.

So I have no choice. And even then, this is not exactly going to be a big trek into the great outdoors. It’s going to be a taxi ride to and from my credit union, which is around five blocks away.

It’s a lot like getting a ride there, but with less guilt and more money.

Originally, I was going to do what I usually do in this situation, which is to take the bus to the bank, cash the cheque, have lunch at White Spot, do a little shopping at Price Mart, then take a cab home with my groceries.

But three variables modify that scenario :

1. It’s winter and therefore cold out
2. My chest cold has gotten worse
3. I am also somewhat depressed

Taken together, this indicate the use of a method that requires the least exposure to the outside air and the least amount of effort.

Ergo hello mister taxicab.

Later on, at suppertime, I will reward myself for getting off my tremendous tuckus and Getting Something Done by ordering in.

I feel like there is an order of my beloved Lamb Rogan Josh in my near future, plus some veggie samosas and garlic naan.

I honeslty thing spicy plus creamy could be the next spicy plus sweet. It’s a great combination because the creaminess takes the rough edges off the spicy heat and makes the whole thing more harmonious.

That’s the same thing adding sweet to the ,mix does, but creaminess does it better.

Everything’s better if it’s creamy, am I right?

Back with Part II later.

---

Well this day just keeps getting better and better.

The good news is that Mission Cashez le Cheque was a success. Yay! I have the cash, I will give Joe the rent later, all is well and good on that front.

But the cabbie refused to wait for me while I cashed my cheque. Which was rude of him. I had no idea they could do that, just say no like that.

I only asked because the last time I had to take a cab there and back to cash my cheque, the cabbie offered to wait for me. And I thought that was very nice of him, but I declined because I was going to do the White Spot then Price Mart thing, and he would have been waiting for hours.

Not. Gonna. Happen.

Guess I should have gotten a rain check on it though, because when I asked the cabbie to wait for me today, he heaved a big sigh and said “Okay. How long will you be?”

I said “ten minutes, tops. ”

He said “Ten minutes is too long. I will not wait. ”

So I paid him and he left. But the fare was $6.15 and I gace him $6.25, meaning his tip was one thin dime.

So I got the moral victory on that one, I think.

So then I do my banking and then realize that I have no means of calling another cab. There’s no such thing as a public phone any more and there was nobody manning the customer service center at my bank, which is where I would normally ask to use a phone in such an emergency.

And I was not about to ask one of the tellers. That would be weird.

So I wandered out of the bank, no idea what to do, and just kept on wandering till I had wandered all the way home.

This was not the smart thing to do. I have a cold and should not have been outside in the cold at all, let alone walking home in it.

The rational think to do would have been to either find a business where I could borrow a phone and wait for a cab or, at the very least, waited for the bus.

But I was feeling restless and perturbed and the last thing I wanted to do was sit still and wait for a bus that might be a long time coming and that would be super crowded anyhow because it was rush hour.

So I wandered on home and here I am. I hope I don’t end up with pneumonia again because of it.

And now my irritable bowel syndrom is acting up and killing my appetite and making me feel like things are not exactly secure down below, ,and that’s ever so fun.

I was hoping to at least be able to go do Subway with La Gang tonight, but now that is looking iffy. And if I end up not going , that means I will have to prevail upon Joe to get me some stuff from 7-11 because my supplies, like their owner, are exhausted.

So all in all, a bad day.

Thank god there’s going to be a new one tomorrow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, P. S. : I know what is annoying my IBS. Hawkins Cheesies. Guess they are on the list of things I can no longer eat now. Dammit.

Feeling sort of blank today. Which is, on some levels, an improvement.

I seem to be back at the restless, angry, and nihilistic phase of my mood cycle. Violent impulses pass through me like gangs of angry rioters. Part of me just wants to smash and destroy everythign and everybody until I can get some peace and quiet in this loud and chaotic mind of mine.

My id wakes up cranky, it seems.

Right now my plan is to maintain and monitor this mood, see where it goes. As unpleasant as it can be to endure, this is exactly the sort of mood that I can use to force some growth if I time things properly and push at the right moment.

I have a lot of pain to birth, and a pissed off mood is a great time for that.

Part of what has me pissed off is this cold that I have had for more than a week now and just won’t go the fuck away. I was positive it was on the way out because my sniffles were disappearing and then I wake up this morning and it has moved into my chest instead and now I am coughing and my chest is full of goo.

I liked the sniffles better. I am used to sniffles. I am great at sniffles.

The fact that this also leads to a certain amount of social isolation doesn’t help matters any either. I can’t hang with my dearest friend Felicity much because she lives with her elderly parents, both of whom have had medical procedures recently, and thus should not be exposed to my goddamned germs.

Fuck my life.

Another thing making me feel pissy is that I am having trouble finishing a module I downloaded for Dragon Age : Origins. The fights at the end are quite hard and I am really struggling to get through.

I have already restarted the thing with a new character once and I am pondering doing it again so I can try it as a mage. It’s not that long a module so starting over again would not be a huge deal, and I am quite good at playing a mage.

Guess I am a wizard at heart. I am at my best when hurtling fireballs and shooting lightning bolts. It is so much more fun than swinging a sword around. Everything else is so boring by comparison.

I’ve also been playing a surprisingly good CCG type game called Eternal. At first blush, it seems pretty much like any other Magic : The Gathering style video game, but the system is very well thought out and deep and has a lot of innovations that are both highly effective and completely original to it.

I have even gotten into playing against other actual people. This is huge for me. As patient readers know, I am usually a very anti-social gamer. I don’t do multiplayer anything most of the time.

I game to escape my social anxiety, not trigger it. Sad but true.

But I guess the fact that the game doesn’t allow chat or anything like it and that it’s a turn based thing makes it socially non-stimulating enough for me to take it.

I will be back for Round 2 later.

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For my whole life, I have felt like I was failing because I never seemed to give people the responses they wanted from me.

It’s hard to explain but I am going to give it a try.

Take my infamous “test” to see if I “needed” to go to kindergarten. I responded to what seemed like a highly absurd situation – a silly woman talking in a silly way going through super easy exercises very slowly at the head of the class(“draw a cir-cle around the mir-or) , and then this schmuck over my shoulder trying to coach me through these absurdly – heck, insultingly – easy exercises (‘Now which one is the mirror… remember, that’s the thing Mommy uses when she puts on her make-up….) – in the way that was most natural to me – with amused and affronted contempt.

That’s not what they wanted or expected. It’s not even something they knew how to handle. My responses were alien to them.

And that’s been the pattern my whole life. Even when I am doing my best to be friendly and affable and agreeable, my responses never seem to satisfy people. There is always something a little off about them. I can tell.

Quite often it has taken the form of what I call being “inconveniently intelligent”. Like seeing through a practical joke or some other kind of social bonding type trickery. Or confounding people’s sense of the rules by doing schoolwork with contemptuous ease.

Even in university, this kept happening. My professors would repeatedly be taken aback by how quickly and thoroughly I absorbed the material and how I would immediately start extrapolating outward from the material at a very high level.

Same with asking questions in class. From my point of view I was doing what all the other students were doing, namely asking for clarification on points.

But my questions were questions they had never been asked before, and I would not blame professors if it sometimes seemed to them like I was attacking them.

I wasn’t. I just wanted to know.

The worst kind of wrong response is the socially wrong response, of course. There I am, trying to get along with normal people, smiling, friendly, agreeable, etc.

And then I get what I can clearly tell is a social cue, and I respond with what I think is being asked of me, and everything comes to a dead stop because that was not the right answer and people don’t know how ot handle it and suddenly I have made all the fish aware of the water they are swimming in and this enormous gulf opens up between me and others and it’s super awkward and I hate myself.

But fuck it. You get what you get with me, world. I’m a unique individual and I will never fulfill your expectations because nothing I do will ever be normal.

But if you stick with me, you will realize that I might be weird but I am also very nice and a heck of a guy when you get to know me.

Those who can make the trip get my sparkling, stimulating company.

Those who can’t can go fuck themselves.

No really, they can. I can prove it. I have pictures.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Depression has a lot of clever, tricky ways of keeping you under its thumb.

And all being smart does is make your depression smarter too. Bright as a star or dull as a worn dime, it’s still a game of chess you play against yourself and that means the outcome is always stalemate.

Which is exactly what the depression wants. Stalemate means it wins.

I look around this room of mine (something I rarely do… more on that later) and I see the piles and piles of garbage and junk and how filthy dirty everything is because I never clean because my depression and/or addiction to video games won’t let me, and I can only come to one conclusion :

It’s really fucking depressing.

Now obviously, the sane response would be to clean it up. It’s a bad thing which is making me sad and I would definitely feel a whole lot better if I cleaned everything up and made things fresh and nice and good for a change.

And on paper, I am perfectly capable of doing so. Cleaning takes effort, of course, but I am pretty sure that if I could find the motivation, I could find the energy.

But that’s not how depression works. Depression makes you (passively) create the bad situation that is very depressing and then it keeps you from doing anything about it by vetoing any large expenditures of energy of any sort for any reason.

And its definition of “large” is almost but not quite equal to “any at all”. Depression makes it hard to believe that any expenditure of actual effort can ever actually be worth it unless it’s in the narrowly defined high reward corridor of our addiction(s).

Yes, I am saying all depressives are addicts. We all self-medicate via the excessive use and over-dependence on something, whether it’s TV or video games or crack cocaine.

Back to my filthy disgusting room before I sidetrack myself any further.

The sane response would be to clean, but the depression blocks that. So instead, I just don’t look at it. Ever. I have total tunnel vision and only see or notice the things directly related to living my sad little life, like the fridge, the path between the fridge and my bedroom, the toilet in my bathroom, and so on.

And even then, I only pay the abolute minimum amount of attention to get the job done. Nothing else enters my mind.

I live in a heavily filtered version of reality. 99 percent of what I perceive is filtered out by my depression’s (extremely) passive filtering.

No wonder nothing seems real to me. Subjectively speaking, it ain’t.

And this is how I have always lived, for as long as I can remember. I have always lived mostly in my head, ignoring most of what is around me in order to keep my stimulation level low enough for me to handle and to preserve the maximum amount of brain power for all the nonstop deep thinking I do.

And when I say nonstop, I mean it. It doesn’t stop for sleep or sex or anything. It’s my brutal truth machine.

I am merely its life support system and maintenance man. Oh, and operator.

Asides aside, living in a constant state of clutter blindness (but more so) is no way to live one’s life. It doesn’t exactly lead to positive outcomes. I would be a much happier and saner person if I tuned into my environment, experienced life in realtime, and made whatever adjustments to my surroundings I needed to do in order to maximize my enjoyment of life.

So what’s stopping me? Isn’t that always the question? And I only have one answer : depression. That’s what’s stopping me.

The answer is that I am crazy and crazy people are weird and don’t make sense.

As patient readers know, I am always fully aware of all the positive things that I “could” be doing for myself. It’s never a matter of not knowing what to do.

I mean, I’m a frigging genius. Of course I know what I “could” do.

But I can’t do those things. Not really. Hence the quotes around “could”. It sure seems like I could. It’s very hard even for someone as articulate as myself to explain why I can’t do these things.

I just…. can’t. It’s like there’s this invisible force field holding me back all the time and keeping me stuck in this rut of mine.

So when I say I don’t know what to do in order to escape this cage of mine, it’s not a request for general suggestions.

What I am really asking for is how do I get out using only the things I can actually do.

And even that is booby trapped. Because even if this vaunted mind of mine came up with a clever as fuck solution that met those extremely demanding specifications and my metaphorical cage door swung open, I would be far too scared to actually leave.

After all, this is the only world I know. This sad life in my sad room doing sad and pointless things on the computer all day is my universe.

And I deserve better. I have a hell of a lot to offer the world and deserve a better, fuller, richer, more satisfying life that takes care of more than my most base needs.

Except for sex. It doesn’t cover that one at all, really. Le sigh.

My life is so…. limited. So tiny. In terms of actual, real, honest experiences, I have had precious few, and almost none in the last decade. I sleepwalk through life, afraid of everything, terrified by all the unknowns of the world, with no faith at all in my ability to handle whatever comes up except by making sure nothing does.

There has to be a real way out. One I could actually take. There must be a weak spot in this eggshell, a place where even my weak pecking can break through.

There must have been been a door there in the wall…. when I came in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s a subject I hate to talk about, which is why I want to talk about it : innocence.

It’s a loaded word if there ever was one and my history with it has not been good. I’ve spent a lot of my life in silent opposition to the very idea of it, on a purely personal level, and I know now what a sick response that was and how if I am to become well, I will have to make peace with innocence.

So let’s start with my bad beginning : for most of my life, starting from when I was a kid, I have told myself that innocence is just another name for ignorance and ignorance was never something to be proud of so innocence was something I did not want or need.

What a load of horse crap.

Sour grapes, all of it. Convincing myself that something I didn’t have and didn’t feel I coild get was something I didn’t want in the first place.

The truth was that I longed for the innocence I saw in other kids. Not consciously, but deeply. On a deep level, I knew they had something I didn’t. Something that made they feel safe and calm and proud and happy.

And good. As in, feeling like they were something good. Something pure, something wholesome, something worthy, something cherished and valued and loved.

Something radically different from my own filthy and toxic soul, that’s for sure.

My innocence was shattered by being raped at the age of 4. Along with said innocence went any sense of safety in the world. I lost the protective layer of ignorance of the darkness of world that protects us from that which we can’t handle when we are young.

That’s what innocence is, at its heart. And like baby fat, it’s something that is supposed to go away slowly over time. It’s not meant to be ripped away all at once, leaving the child cold and exposed and all too aware of the harshness and cruelty of the world and not nearly ready to deal with it.

Like a premature baby. But one forced to make it on its own anyhow.

So a lot of my childhood was spent simply trying to keep myself safe despite the vulnerable state the rape had left me in. Pretty much all my problems have this weakness – this emotional “failure to thrive’ – as the biggest component.

Other factors did not help. Like the emotional neglect at home and the bullying at school that both reinforced the idea that I was a horrible disgusting unworthy thing. Or the hours and hours of boredom at school that made me feel like being brighter than the rest of the kids was a bad thing and I was being punished for it. Or the not unrelated fact that I didn’t get to go to kindergarten because I was so bright I didn’t “need” it.

But at the heart of it all was soul rending trauma of losing my innocence.

More on that later.

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Innocence 2 : The Innocenting

So I have spent my life feeling like I was a sick repulsive thing The rape started it when I was four, and the rest of my childhood confirmed it.

After all, if everyone treated me so badly, it must be because there is something fundamentally wrong with me, right?

A lot of victms of long term abuse come to that conclusion, sadly enough. It’s easier to think that than to face the fact that the people who are supposed to love you and care about you and look out for you are, in fact, the ones doing the very things they are supposed to be protecting you against.

For a child, that’s simply an unthinkable thought. Because if it’s true, that means you are alone in the world without any safety or anyone to turn to.

And there is nothing a child fears more than abandonment.

So even if it’s true that their parent(s) are horrible, they won’t see it. They can’t see it. They will cling to their parents no matter how unworthy said parents are.

Anyhow. Enough of that. That’s theorizing, and that’s not what this is about.

Back to innocence. I never felt like I had any.

So I didn’t take care of myself. Still don’t, really. But when I lived with Angela in her poop-filled pet hoarding environment and barely ever showered, things got super bad re : my hygiene and odor problems.

So people in the Core program at Richmond Hospital complained and asked me why I didn’t wash more, and I said “Because there’s no such thing as a clean turd!”.

Stark, no? That’s honestly how I felt at the time. That there was no point in cleaning myself because I was a living turd and no matter how much I cleaned myself, I would still be a piece of shit.

And I still struggle with that feeling sometimes. There are times when it’s pretty hard to get myself into the shower and it all seems so pointless.

But the good news is that I am getting over that now. And it starts with the belief that I am not an inherently filthy thing. So here’s tonight’s self-proclamation.

“I am good. I am clean. I am wholesome. I am a good, clean, wholesome boy with nothing to be ashamed of. I am not dirty. I am not disgusting. I am not repulsive. And I am certainly not toxic. And no shift of brain chemicals can change that. No matter how I feel or how sick I get, I will still be the same good, clean, wonderful boy inside and nobody can ever change that. What was done to me by a stranger in a public shower did not makes me dirty. They’re the dirty ones. They are the ones who raped a four year old boy and wounded him for life. I was just an innocent victim who did nothing wrong. So all the badness belongs to him, not me. I am innocent. I am clean.I am pure. “

I feel better now. My water pours clear and clean now, and will wash away my sin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been pondering subjectivity and people’s relationship to it. Specifically, people who can’t accept their own subjectivity and insist that the world is exactly as they perceive it no matter how blatantly absurd their perceptions are.

I have an example. It’s a comedy bit I wrote in my head a long time ago.

Felicity. I know you don’t like this bit, so feel free to skip it.

“Oh yeah Grandpa. That has to be it. At some point, absolutely everyone in the world – including people in Australia and everybody on TV – started mumbling. That is definitely the only possible explanation. Somehow, the world, as one, united , and, as species no less, we all decided to start mumbling. You were the only one left out of that historically unprecented meeting of all the minds on Earth. Oh – and we did it just to annoy you, too. I mean, why else would we do it? A seamless global conspiracy is the only possible explanation. It certainly can’t be that you’re losing your hearing. ”

Man, that comes off as dickish. It’s a good thing I have never actually used it in anything,. Typed out like that, I just want to punch the speaker in the face.

Let your Grandpa have his comforting delusions, god damn it!

Anyhow, you get the idea. Some people simply cannot (or will not) accept the truth of their own subjectivity. They will insist, to their dying day, that everything has always been exactly as they perceived it, without any need to check their perceptions for logic or likelihood or even internal consistency.

And there is a word for what they lack : metaconsciousness.

You need a fairly good metaconscious mind to be able to examine your perceptions of reality for potential flaws. One definition of the metaconscious is that it is the part of the mind that thinks about what it’s thinking.

It’s the part of the mind that spots logic flaws. And I am not just talking about some abstruse intellectual kind of logic flaws.

I am talking about the simple perception of things just plain not adding up.

And anyone can get that feeling. So when I talk of the metaconscious mind, I am not talking about something that some people have and others don’t.

We all have one. We would not be able to maintain the internal integrity of our minds without one. The very data structures of the human mind would fall apart.

However, some people’s metascious minds are much stronger, and operate on a higher level, than other people’s.

And I am afraid that it correlates with intelligence. We have the level of metaconsciousness that we can handle, more or less.

This causes a lot of conflict between people on different levels of metaconsciousness. To the person on the higher level, the flaws in the reasoning of people on a lower level are glaringly obvious and they can’t believe they even have to explain them.

For the lower level person, the higher level person’s critiques can’t help but feel like a very dangerous personal attack that they absolutely must defend against with all their being because when you challenge someone’s perceptions, you are challenging the very foundation of their consciousness, and that…. hurts.

It is quite possible that if they accepting the higher perceptive person’s logic. it would send them into a deep existential quandy which they have no way to understand and no faith in their ability to escape.

That’s why people like that hate us liberal intellectual types and think we are out to destroy everything they love and care about.

On this specific level, we are. We question their deepest beliefs and are then surprised when they fight back with great rage and vigor. We can’t imagine why they are so mad because, after all, we can change our beliefs based on new evidence.

Or so we think, anyhow.

But that’s easy for us to say because we have that higher level of metaconsciousness that allows for such shifts in belief. Others do not. So we have no idea how the average person would pay a much higher price than we would to update their beliefs.

We know not what we ask of them, nor do we know what harm we do by asking.

Myself, I have always grasped the limits of my own perceptions. That hardly makes infallible, but it does give me a higher level of metaconsciousness that most people.

After all, I’m a genius.

And so I am often frustrated by what to me are the obvious deficiencies in the thinking of most people. This frustation could have easily turned me into a standard bitter and misanthropic intellectual who rails against how stupid people are in a cunning move designed to make my own social deficiencies everyone else’s fault.

Obviously, I did not go that route. Lots of my fellow intellectuals do. It is a natural and understandable response given how badly life often treats us smart but socially awkward types and how that makes us seek refuge in misanthropy.

But it’s not for me. I know that it is me that is broken, not them, and that it’s not that they are idiots but that I am a genius.

And perhaps that is my higher level of metaconsciousness at work. I can see misanthropy for the spiritual dead end it is, and thus avoid it.

And maybe, from a mystic’s point of view, that means I am on a higher spiritual plane than most of humanity.

All I can say about that is : it’s so cold up here. I wish I could be down there with the common folks, mingling with them, and sharing their warmth.

But I am not like them, and I will never be one of them.

So I watch from afar, and dream.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.