Because sometimes, that’s the best thing you can do.

Been thinking about my “never stop” mode and how much damage I might be doing to myself due to my inability to escape it.

For those of you who do not remember (and there’s bound to be a few of them), what I am talking about is how in order to get through life when I was still a kid in school, I developed the capacity to simply keep going at a minimal level no matter what.

Picture a golem that walks forward very slowly but never stops.

The thing is, this circuit I built in my mind is extremely handy and has seen me through a lot of days when I didn’t feel like carrying on but knew I must.

The problem is that there is no off switch. No matter what, I just keep doing at my minimal level, and when you have depression, that can get pretty minimal.

And the metaphor I use to explain why that is such a bad thing is this : imagine there is a car that never, ever stops moving. It can’t. It will keep moving no matter what.

So how would one perform maintenance on it? How would you refuel? How could you ever fix any problem that arose?

You wouldn’t. You couldn’t. Things would just get worse and worse until the car is a total wreck that still drags itself forward, sparks flying and metal grinding, forever.

That is how I am. I am, by any measure, one very broken and messed up vehicle. Were I sane, I would have some capacity to shut down, take care of what needs to be taken care of, and most importantly. refuel.

Instead, I just keep painfully grinding on. Making only very slow and painful progress because I have forgotten how to stop.

Even thinking about coming to a full stop tweaks my anxiety in a very weird way and invokes that nameless dread that says Something Very Bad Will Happen.

But what? Would I die? Or rather, would that mean I was dead? Would my mind destroy itself somehow? Would the world cave in and fall on my head?

Would some presumably very patient inner demon finally catch up with me and do something completely horrible to me?

Would I plunge into my inner abyss like a meteor crashing into Earth’s atmosphere at high speed? And would I burn up on re-entry?

Would some kind of unspeakable darkness escape confinement in my soul and boil out of me like malicious black smoke and plunge me into eternal darkness?

Would my spark finally go out completely and, sans pilot light, I would become a mindless wanting thing that craved the warmth of human blood?

None of those sound particularly likely to me. And yet, I didn’t pull them out of nowhere. Every one of those possibilities, as surreal and outre as they are, feels like something that could truly happen to me.

Admittedlly, less so now that I have written them down. Writing all that shit down definitely got something out of me, and I feel a lot better now.

Mark that down. It has to be important.

Anyhow…. where was I? Oh right, the car that never stops.

There is a highly wonderful meme going around aboout Self Care Charizard.

He looks like this :

Sorry that I don’t know how to make the images appear in a neat grid like they do in the original meme. One of these days I should take a break and learn more WordPress.

See what I did there?

Anyhow, my point in sharing all that, besides the sheer joy of sharing a sweet and adorable meme, was to point out that I don’t have anything like that in my life.

Literally. There is nothing that I do in order to nourish my body and my spirit. I have no special routine that I use to de-stress and make my body happy. Truth is, I do not do a goddamned thing anything remotely like that.

I have no self-care routine. Instead, I just…. keep…. going.

And that is… kind of big. Other people value theirs very highly and would say that they would go crazy without it.

And I don’t have one. And I am crazy.

So I am thinking they have a point.

Instead. I just compulsively play video games all the goddamned time. And while you can get one hell of a lot from a good video game. one thing you cannot get from one is spiritual nourishment or mental release.

Well, except from the REALLY good ones.

So stress builds up in me and goes nowhere. There is no release mechanism. Hell, most of the time, I can’t evenmasturbate to blow off steam.

And we must ask : why? Why, unlike most human beings, did I never develop any sort of coping and/or healing routine to make myself feel better?

I mean, WTF is wrong with me?

Well firstly, I am super divorced from my emotions. I mean, I don’t even see them at family gatherings any more. that’s how divorced we are.

Pause for laughter………there.

Because I am so out of touch wuith my emotions,. I could be generating all the signals that lead normal, healthy, sane persons to seek to comfort themselves and never receiving them because I block all that shit out.

A lot of my problems boil down to that in the final analysis. Diagnosis : Could have been avoided if you just listened to your damned emotions.

And I would love to start, but I am also very scared of it. For better and intensely worse, I am emotionally dependent on my little kingdom of icy intellectualism, and the very idea of acting on emotional impulses without any other justification given or needed seems like stark raving chaos to me.

I wouldn’t even know who I was any more. And how would I control who I become?

It’s so hard for me to walk a road without knowing and/or controlling where it leads. And I fear walking unarmed into the darkness and chaos of my mind most of all.

If only someone could hold my hand through all of this and I could use some of their warmth and their light to keep me safe as I explored this alien new world.

But they can’t.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, this is stuck in my head :

Anyhow. I had a good and fruitful idea of what to write about tonight, but I forgot it. Which is disappointing, because I had actually managed to remember some of them long enough to write about lately.

But the idea, she is gone, and we must carry on.

Been pondering the central problem of nerdity today, which is that non-nerds have this whole area of awareness that we lack, namely social context. This awareness is so important to human beings that lacking it is almost like having a missing sense.

We are socially blind. And that causes problems.

But what makes it even worse is that we, as a culture. lack both the vocabulary and the consciousness to even talk about what it is we nerds are missing. The people who have the social sense don’t know it – the fish don’t know they’re wet – and the people who lack it obviously cannot perceive what they are missing either.

And so when people try to explain why something we did was wrong, they inevitably fail because they presuppose our having this social sense and so to us, their explanations can sound like either total nonsense or like they are trying to trick us into feeling bad by invoking some mystical sixth sense they say they have but cannot explain.

And of course they cannot explain it because they have this sense and we don’t. It’s like trying to explain the color yellow to someone born blind. It would take someone of extraordinary insight and articulancy to even get the basic concepts across.

Know anyone like that? Hint : You do.

Who knows, maybe my destiny is to do for nerds what Temple Grandin did for autism. Bridge the gap with words from my unique perspective as someone who is part of the problem and can see the problem clearly and yet also has the necessary detachment and articulacy to diagnose and describe it.

Oh look, another potential career. I will put it with the rest.

Most of us nerds have very painful memories of ending up “in trouble” or otherwise ending up at the short end of the social stick, with people glaring at us and mad at us and everything, for reasons people either cannot explain or whose explanations do not make sense to us because they refer to things we do not comprehend and which seem to us to be either fictional or the very least arbitrary.

And so a lot of people of my ilk conclude that people are irrational. unfair, and untrustworthy. What else can you think about people who keep getting angry about things you cannot perceive and have to take their word that it even exists?

This is, however, a fundamentally irrational conclusion because it presupposes some sort of conspiracy to hurt the nerd personally by punishing them for random and unpredictable things, and that assumption is laughably enormous and not even vaguely likely to be true.

Trust me : you are not that important to people.

What they are asking of you is neither arbitrary nor cruel and it certainly isn’t part of some effort to make you feel bad for no good reason. It’s the exact same things that they expect from everyone else. And most people have it,. at least to some degree, and so expecting it from you is mistaken but it is not irrational.

See, ours is an invisible disability. So invisible that most people don’t even know it exists and those who do don’t necessarily understand it. Worse, it is often as invisible to us as it is to others, and so there is this enormous gap between the nerd world and the mundane world filled with mutual ignorance and misunderstanding.

This is a very hard topic to discuss with my fellow nerds as it cuts right through to some of the most painful memories they (and I) have and the way they adapted to cope with those painful memories.

Why? Because my theories on the subject lead inevitably to the conclusion that in those painful moments, the nerd in question was, in a sense. at fault.

Not morally, of course, or even intellectually. It as their fault only in the sense that it is them who has the problem and not the world, and therefore it is them who has to change to adapt to the world, not the world that has to be adapted for them.

After all, if a blind person demanded that the entire world be changed so that they can navigate it as well as a sighted person, without needing a cane or a dog or a knowledge of Braille or anything, we would think that was pretty absurd.

But the thing is. the decision that it is the world that is at fault, while fundamentally irrational, is absolutely necessary for most of us when faced with the problem of a world that expects of us something we cannot even see.

Without that coping mechanism. ours would be a truly terrifying world filled with invisible dangers and undetectable hazards.

Which, come to think of it, is how a lot of us feel about the world.

So of course. we very often conclude that the world is crazy and that only in our highly intellectual worlds of fandoms and conventions and a relatively lack of expectation to conform to these invisible rules does the world make sense at all.

That’s certainly how I feel about it. Science fiction conventions are the places where I feel the most confident and free. Dealing with my fellow nerds is easy for me.

It’s normal people who freak me out.

So because this line of thinking of mine goes against said vitally needed coping mechanism, my fellow nerds’ reactions to them can be very strong, even extreme.

And it amuses me to note that in the past, I have reacted exactly like the clueless nerd that I am and been all, “What? Why are people so mad? What did I do wrong?”.

But I have grown and learned since then, and now I am very careful about to whom and how I even bring the subject up, and when I do, I know to expect considerable blowback (to put it mildly).

Which means that I have learned to be less of a clueless nerd.

And who knows? Maybe you can too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, right now I am about as depressed as I get on a regular basis.

I feel very cold and dead inside. And with that numbness comes the sussurations of a silent scream that is bourn on the wings of a terrible and terrifying sense of wrongness.

Like a foot that has fallen asleep when it’s just woken up. my psyche cries out for what it knows should be there but is not.

As a result, I feel small, and scared, and vulnerable, and so very very cold.

And the bad thoughts come unbidden, even though I never let them in. But I suppoose they serve a purpose : to let some of the insanity out and make things just a little less claustrophobic in this pent up worn down soul of mine.

Well, if there is ever a time for birthing my pain, this is it. It’s close to the surface anyhow, so all it takes is a little push and yet another bucket of ice cubes comes squirting out my virtual cloaca.

Gross, but there are worse metaphors. Trust me on that one.

I just feel so dead inside. Clearly the forces of life-destroying numbness have the upper hand in my psyche right now. Lord knows why.

Doesn’t really matter why. Whatever the reason, it’s mine to deal with right now.

I think I am going through a season of change lately. The sort of deep, lasting change that’s as painful, bloody, and unpleasant as an elephant’s breech birth but that – hopefully – will leave me stronger and more sane for having gotten rid of the stuff.

Emotional emesis strikes again. Seems like it’s all I ever do.

I feel anger and frustration underneath all the numbness as well, but it is a dark and dead thing. I picture it as a huge hulking zombie filled with nothing but mindless. undirected hate senselessly hacking away at anything and everything that comes near with no more sense of purpose or reason than a muscular reflex.

It kills because only in acts of brutal violence does it find a moment’s relief from the terrible screaming pain inside.

Somewhere inside it there is a void that bleeds and it gnaws on the zombie’s heart like terminal frostbite and the only way to stop it is to feed it someone else.

The zombie can only experience life in the act of destroying it.

At least I retain the awareness that this too shall pass and that I am not being punished for anything and this pain does not change who I am as a person.

It’s just the weather.

This awareness is as cold and dead as the feelings it protects me against, and maybe that’s not a coincidence. It is no source of warmth and light in the tortuous taiga of my inner world right now.

It;s more like a numbness against the numbness – a dead zone around the last scrap of live gristle and flesh left in the deep freeze that is my zombie’s raw and bloated flesh.

I am just chock a block with charming imagery today.

This is the sort of mood which causes some people to cut themselves, I suppose. I have never wondered why. To me, it is obvious that when you feel this numb and that silent screaming gets to be too much, you can become so desperate to feel something and shut that damn scream up that pain and bleeding can be a blessed relief.

Luckily. I am far too squeamish for that kind of thing. And I think it occurs more in people whose depression has more anxiety in it than me. I am too phlegmatic for that kind of thing.

After all. someone might take that as a cry for help, and then they’d KNOW.

And if they KNOW, they will come and GET me and take me AWAY.

And that would be the worst thing ever. according to my emotions. That would be the unthinkable horror, the sum of all fears, the Thing Most Dreaded, the apocalyptic apotheosis of all my pain, the outcome too frightful to imagine.

Because deep down I am still that scared little animal, the fox only seconds ahead of the hunt, the kid who laid down in a snowbank and willed himself to die so that it would all finally be OVER.

And that scared little animal is absolutely sure that to be found and caught is to die. Or worse, will make him want to die.

And that’s a setting that cannot be changed. I am permanently frightened. Some day, I might get the sorts of emotional inputs that would let me thaw that scared little fox out and rescue him from the hounds of his own creation.

But I don’t think I will ever lose the fear. Not entirely. There will always be the dark and dirty knowledge, deep in my soul, that my fellow humans can be the enemy and that the only real safety comes from invisibility.

And that’s the feeling that keeps me from promoting my own work. No matter how much I crave money, acclaim, acceptance, and the power to share my dreams with the world. there is always that voice deep inside me that insists that I can’t afford to draw attention to myself because that will surely doom me.

It’s basically a war between the forces that cause me to isolate myself so heavily and the loneliness and vast unmet ego needs that such isolation brings on.

It’s like being a very hungry anorexic. I’m starving but I’m too scared to eat. And it doesn’t matter how much I tell myself that this is crazy and that I should go out into the world in search of food, that fear always wins.

It always has its thumb on the scale and can summon up as much ice cold life negating force as it takes to completely overwhelm and suppress any impulse I have to act.

And I am fucking sick and tired of it. There has to be some way to tilt things in my favour for a change. A way to beat the rigged system.

And some day, I am going to find it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Standard disclaimer : these ideas are new and hence noit well thought out yet.

So bear with me.

It just occurred to me that there has to be a limit to how much one’s ego and self-worth is open to the vagaries of fate.

Put another way, there has to be a point past which one’s self-worth is no longer taking input. A zone where it doesn’t matter what happens and it doesn’t matter what anything thinks or says, the score will go no lower, period.

And I know what you’re thinking (spooky, isn’t it?) : That sounds an awful lot like narcissism, doesn’t it?

And you’re right, it does. But it is not narcissism. A narcissist is someone who puts all or nearly all of reality in that zone. They take a good thing – having this buffer zone – and turn it into insanity by taking it way too far.

My point is, everyone needs a No Apologies Zone. If they lack one. then they are missing the fundamental foundation needed for a stable self worth.

It is neither safe nor healthy to have your entire self worth on the line all the time. Like a gambler who bets it all every single time, it is a recipe for failure. Nobody’s self worth can survive that no matter how many reasons to think highly of themselves they have.

Like, to pick a random example, being hyper-intelligent, creatively gifted, and one heck of a nice guy to boot.

The problem for people of my own foolish mindset is that the act of sealing off part of your self-worth from all inputs is fundamentally irrational. In the false reality of reason, nothing should ever be immune to change based on new evidence. In theory, one’s entire mind, from brain stem to cerebral cortex, is constantly open to a radical realignment at any moment.

In practice, of course, that would make a person completely mentally unstable. People have to keep a lot of the fundamentals of reality constant in their minds or they would go insane. There is only so rational we can afford to be.

And yeah, I am talking to myself there.

And the thing is, most people do not, in fact, need to be told this or taught this because most people respond to and act upon their emotions without the interference of the reasoning mind as least some of the time.

So they don’t have to think about it, they just react. Someone hurts their pride and they strike back verbally at the source of their pain. Something agrees with their self-image and they accept it without question. Something makes them feel uncomfortable so they reject it as untrue.

You know, all the things that us smart logical types are not supposed to do. Irrational things. We’re supposed to be better than that.

Yeah right. Not if we know what’s good for us, which is an open question.

One can frame it as a sort of self-interest equation. Why should I, a naked beach ape who just wants to be happy, accept a truth into my mind that will only make me upset and unhappy when I can simply reject it and stay happy?

The counterargument would be that you are always better off knowing the bitter truth than living in a puffed up fantasy land, but I no longer think that is true. I think it is, in fact, an article of faith, and that faith can demand sacrifices far in excess of its utility.

And people of average intelligence get that, albeit unconsciously. It’s only us over-brained fools who go around shouting “VERITAS UBER ALLES” and making grand statements about The Truth and strutting our intellectually rugged stuff.

I have talked before (I think) about how a certain kind of intellectual openness is akin to simply eating everything you see and trusting your digestive system to work things out from there, with nor regard to the damage it may do to you or how it might make you feel later on.

A sensible organism knows to give things a sniff test and maybe a bit of a lick before deciding whether or not to eat something. Our minds should be at least that intelligent, and for most people, they are.

Again, it’s just us misguided lunatics with more brains than sense who act like we can take anything and try to make a virtue out of our lack of discernment.

There is nothing wrong with asking, “what will this do to me?” before integrating new information into your mind. That doesn’t mean making that the only concern – that way lies narcissism, even solipsism – it just makes it a legitimate question.

So when a Fox News type rejects the truth about oh, so very many things, understand that they are acting in their own best interests regardless of what us lofty intellectuals think they “should” do.

So let’s join them in a radical existential statement : I would rather be wrong and happy than right and miserable.

I have been asking “Would you rather be right, or happy?” for years in reference to people hanging on to emotional and/or philosophical positions that are bad for them simply because if they let go that means someone else was “right” all along and they would rather DIE than admit it.

But it turns out to be far bigger than that. There are things far more important than having the “right” answer or knowing that you are more “right” about things than others.

That is a very hard thing for a former precocious child’s mind to wrap itself around. We tend to have far, far too much of our self-worth wrapped up in being “right”. As if at any second there might be a quiz and we will need all the “right” answers to pass.

But the real logical truth is that what matters most to any of us crazed sex monkeys is whether or not we are happy, not whether or not we are right.

It’s just taken me a long time to figure that out.

Well I said I was intelligent, I didn’t say I was smart.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Apparently I am back at the “oscillating between deep depression and smoldering rage” part of my mood cycle.

Pardon my cartwheels of effervescent joy.

Imagine that being said by The Brain from Pinky and the Brain.

For use as your exemplar :

That’s a very cute thing for those fun folks at Postmodern Jukebox to have done.Initially, I was just there for the Rob and Maurice content, but the smoldering torch song version of the theme is great too, especially when (SPOILER) she looks right into the camera and says “Narf. ” at the end.

I marked so hard for that. I really have a soft spot for women who can be silly.

God, I miss my sisters.

Anyhow,. so I am down in the dumps again. Last night’s mental malfunction was such a blow to my sense of reality that I don’t think I have fully recovered yet, and it happened around 22 hours ago.

That shit just shouldn’t happen, man. Thanks to my computer based lifestyle and dreamer nature, I already live in the world between my ears far too much and as a result, my sense of reality – the non-virtual kind – is already threadbare at best.

As a result of that, on a very real and very very deep level, I don’t have faith in reality. I don’t feel like I can count on things staying real and I have a deep dread of ending upo trapped in my own mind with no way out.

So something like last night’s journey into being even more mentally fucked up than usual really scares me right down to the core.

It makes me realize just how blurry the boundry between outer reality and mental reality can be for me. Not to the point of being schizophrenic. thank goodness, but to the point of a certain level of mental instability nevertheless.

I would likely be better off if I stepped away from the computer more often and spent time just sitting outside, drinking in the realness of it all and grounding myself in the real world before going back to the shadowbox of my mind.

That’s how my relationship with reality feels right now : like I spend all day in a world which I treat as real. but which is really only shadows and less than shadows projected into my mind via my various distractions.

Hell. even spending more time reading books would help ground me. Even they are more real than all this video game bullshit.

So yeah. I am back to hating and resenting video games again too.

And I tell myself that I can’t stop playing them, or that I don’t know how to stop, and so forth, but is that really true?

Or is the real truth that I know perfectly well how to stop and could stop any time I wanted if I was willing to sever the umbilicus that ties me to them and keeps me emotionally dependent on them?

That’s the nature of addiction. Even if you know the thing you are addicted to is killing you, you keep using because you are too scared of having to deal with reality without the addiction that you will ride that burning wagon right over the cliff.

Abnd up until the very end, you will be telling yourself that everything is fine. And if you happen to survive the crash. you will tell yourself that it was an unavoidable tragedy, woe is me, and then go right back to using.

Because the crash changed nothing. You are still emotionally dependent on your addiction and you are still too scared to face the world without it to change.

And that’s not the sort of person I want to be. I want to be the Taurus ideal of a square-jawed realist who can make the tough choices and do whatever is necessary regardless of fear or squeamishness. The sort of person you can always count on because you know that their fundamental values are rock solid and that they will live by them one hundred percent or die trying.

And I am that guy. For others.

For myself, not at all, really.

And it’s high time I stop pretending that this self-neglect is okay. It isn’t. I act contrary to my own self-interest all the time and to be honest, I deserve better.

I can hear my therapist saying I need to be my own parent right now, and I can feel the utter despair that filled me when he did because if that’s the only solution, I am fucked.

Because I am not sure I am capable of that. I can’t imagine where I would find the strength. My deep damage would make it so hard.

And that’s what this all boils down to : on a fundamental level, I am deeply damaged. and that damage cries out like a physical injury when I try to do things.

And lacking the ability to x-ray my psyche, I don’t know beforehand what will set it off. I now some things that will, but that list is never going to be comprehensive.

And because of that, I really have no good explanation for why I can or can’t do something. The closest I can come to a real, honest explanation would be, “because the injured part of my mind hurts me when I try to imagine doing it. ”

And it might be wrong. In fact, historically. its predictive record is spotty at best. There have been plenty of times when I thought I couldn’t but totally could once I made up my mind to do it.

But it’s still all I have got. I don’t have the capacity to think past it yet. When it tells me that a course of action will lead to nothing but pain, anxiety, and misery, it is very hard not to listen to it.

Even though it leads me wrong.

I feel so god damned alone nearly all the time.

And I don’t know how to fix that at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have had temporal confusion before, but never like this.

Somehow, I got my AM and PM mixed up so bad that until a couple of minutes ago, I thought it was 9:35 AM and its 9:36 PM.

That means that when I thought I was having breakfast at 6:22 am, I was having supper. at 6:22 PM. My whole world just jumped twelve hours and quite frankly I am fucking freaking out about it right now.

What the hell was I doing all day, then? Somewhere along the line, I lost twelve hours of my life. Or at least that’s what it feels like.

Intellectually (boy I use that word a lot), I know that it must all add up and that all that really happened was that I went to sleep in the afternoon and woke up when it was dark and my mind leapt to the wrong conclusion.

But that’s logic and I am not feeling very logical right now. Instead, I am feeling scared, dislocated, unstable, and like I want ot go back to sleep and see if things make sense again when I wake up.

In retrospect, this has been coming on for weeks. I have been having incidents like this but at a much lower intensity even since the first of the month. At least four or five times a week, I have been finding myself having a moment when I don’t know which end of the day I am in, and I then have to deduce the answer before the memory comes back and I am in sync once more.

But that was peanuts compared to this. I can’t evenj be sure when the inversion happened. To me, it really feels like I skipped half a day. I don’t remember what I did for most of today, the 22nd of February, 2019.

I can only hope that with time, the fear will subside and the fog will clear and I will be able to repair my fractured consciousness so that I can be whole again.

Or at least no more broken than usual.

This kind of thing can’t keep happening. It’s too hard on my poor nerves. I am in a state of shock right now. I am trembling from the shock of it all and I feel dizzy and tingly and a little bit nauseous and I really wish I could make things be normal again.

I sure as heck don’t feel like blogging. And yet, in another way, I do feel like blogging, because at least this forces me to slow my thoughts down and put them in order. And it lets me express all this panic I am feeling.

And it’s just not fair, you know? I keep trying to put together something like a stable and happy mindset but every time I get close, something like this happens to completely shatter my sense of security and make me feel cold and small and terrified again.

I have to wonder whether my subconscious mind is a far more terrifying opponent than I every imagined if it is willing and able to do such extreme things in order to scare me into not rocking the boat any more.

What’s next? Active psychosis?

Right now, I reallty wish I had someone who could just hold me tight. They wouldn’t even have to say anything reassuring. In fact, I would prefer they did not, for I am in no mood to be reassured by words. What I need is to hold on tight to someone and feel their warmth and solidity and nearness and know that they are real and I am real and the world is real and everything is going to be okay.

But I don’t have anyone like that in my life. I don’t know if I ever will. I feel like I am doomed to wander the cold dark tundra of my mind naked and defenceless till the end of time, or at least my frozen lonely death.

Was it ever warm? Could their really have been a time when I didn’t feel this way? Right now it is hard to even imagine it.

Intellectually (ding!), I know that I have felt good before, or at least okay. In fact, I felt reasonable good as recently as yesterday afternoon, during therapy. I bounced into therapy feeling pretty good, probably mostly due to the lovely sunshine.

The evidence is piling up that I have a solar powered mood.

And now it is 10:07 pm and I was really looking forward to getting together with my friends for Subway or whatever in around an hour and a half but now I know I can’t go because I am just plain too freaked out and can’t imagine facing the world in this state.

I can barely imagine facing the rest of the apartment.

So now I have to call Joe and tell me that I can’t go out tonight and ask him to get some things from 7-11 for me.

And that is also not an easy thing to do when I am in this emotional state. But it is still easier than having to get dressed and go out into the bright loud socially stimulating world, with all its chaos and randomness and jarring sensations.

And I wish it wasn’t this way. Especially because I missed Tuesday’s hang out time due to a pretty bad IBS attack like an hour before I would have left.

Which might well have been psychosomatic. I hate to admit it, but it may be that on some level, I have gone back to making myself sick in order to justify isolating myself. In a way, it’s just a different way of having a panic.

One that comes with a guarateed escape from the tension causing the panic in the first place. As con jobs go, it is very efficient.

God I wish that life/the Universe/my goddamned mind would leave me the fuck alone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Some of these ideas are not fully formed yet, so, be warned, this might be slightly more incoherent than usual.

Anyhow. I have been pondering the id and its function and how Western traditional philosophy, being invented by a bunch of wimpy philosophers with big brains, tends to act like the id is optional and all the cool kids are getting rid of them because thye can be so unreasonable and ugly and stuff.

And that kind of relates directly to my mess. Not that I am blaming Western “rationalism” for my problems. I am just saying that my problems are in line with them.

After all, I’m a wimpy philosopher with a big brain too.

So to rephrase things in more personal terms, my problem is that I have vastly overdeveloped that big brain of mine (ego) and let that massive truth machine of mine also become a harsh,. unforgiving, and corrupt judge ruling over my life (superego) while my id, which is the base of everything else and very very very NOT optional, has been repeatedly beaten down, humiliated. and shoved into a cage of reason.

So that’s why I called this entry The Cage Of Reason. I’d forgotten.

And the hot take on that is that I have only recently consciously realized that I had this problem and it really bothers me. It’s so very obviously unsustainable and insane and yet there it is, sitting in my brain. causing problems.

In a very deep and very weird way, it hurts my pride.

This dovetails neatly with my recent observations about how hard it is to face my anger. Anger is very much an id thing and I have suppressed so much of it that it’s like this massive iceberg with only a tiny bit that shows above the water that I have learned to totally ignore because come on, how big a problem can it be? It’s just this tiny hunk of ice floating on the water!

If you only count the part you can see.

What a load of crap!

This is the complex theater of the conscious mind. It’s like our consciousness is the stage and our subconscious mind is all the behind the scenes jobs. The subconscious stage manages (ha) things in order to get the result it wants and it does so by only showing on stage what it knows will get said result.

Thus my ability to smugly believe that I am this paragon of reason and restraint with an all-powerful spotlight that reveals all while in reality. I am the most deluded fool of all,. namely the fool who thinks himself wise.

Picture a donkey wearing a graduation cap and a crown. King Jackass himself.

And the whole system is based on my willingness to believe that what I see on stage is all their is. To pretend that the stage is reality and sanity and everything outside of it is either unreal or unimportant and therefore it is safe – smart even – to totally ignore it and pretend like it ain’t there.

What a double load of crap!

And that REALLY hurts the pride. Because I am not that kind of person. I pride myself in being the kind of person who tackles unpleasant truths head on and deals with them rather than burying my head in the sand and pretending everything is OK.

Or at least, that’s the sort of person I thought I was. I suppose that was part of the subconscious shit show too.

After all. what better way to get away with fooling a very smart person than by convincing them that they are so smart that they don’t even have to bother looking into what is going on behind the scenes because they already know?

And if I am the sort of levelheaded, realistic, pragmatic person that doesn’t ignore truths merely because they are painful, then I can’t possibly be hiding unpleasant truths from myself and there is no need to even check if that is true.

It’s a high efficiency bullshit system. I will give it that.

Well deep down I am still a fundamental pragmatist, and that means that now that I have discovered all this bullshit, it simply has to go.

The jig is up, ego and superego. And I am heading backstage with a flashlight and a bad attitude, so watch the fuck out.

And somehow…. somehow… I am going to uncage my poor ol beaten down id. It’s not going to be easy because all my most powerful and often used tools are unsuited for the task. This is not the sort of thing I can solve via a massive application of analytical muscle, like I do with most things.

No, this involves a very deep, profound, and delicate change of permissions. Somehow, I need to take away the unlimited access the evil duo of my ego and superego have had to more or less do whatever the fuck they want to me, regardless of consequences, and give my id permission to overrule them when the emotional stakes are high.

Or when I just need a fucking break, for that matter.

And that is going to take more than this endless process of self-analysis. Sure, said process has helped me a lot over the years. Writing down my problems like I am doing right now goes a long way towards being able to handle them.

But it only goes so far. Past a certain point, I am going to have to stop reeling out my own guts on this blog and actually go out into the world and do things.

Good things. Warm things. Wholesome things. Things that make me feel happy and alive and hopeful. Things that will bring the sort of emotional inputs I need.

Because I sure as fuck can’t generate them for myself. Not yet, anyhow.

But I have faith that one day. I will be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Some thoughts on being Generation X.

What I don’t think people realize about us is that we were the first generation raised without a stay at home parent. The first generation where both parents worked.

And that’s kind of a huge deal because in one generation, the amount of parenting children got dropped by half… if you’re lucky.

Usually it was even less than that, as two working parents did not add up to one stay at home parent. What you got instead was two parents who were equally too busy, too tired, too stressed, and above all too wrapped up in their own thing to pay much attention to the kids at all.

It’s no wonder that we grew up to be sullen and resentful, and why we look upon the Fifties as a kind of wonderland of stability, security, and peace (despite all the bad stuff). I think we sense, at a cellular level, the massive amount of emotional support we lost.

We were children raised by parents who themselves had been raised in traditional ‘nuclear’ family and could not understand why we were so much less secure and much more likely to stay at or return to the family home.

The answer is obvious but the generation involved, the Boomers, are uniquely self-absorbed and resistant to the very idea that they could do anything wrong, so instead we had them shrugging and saying “I dunno. Must be that rap music. ”

We were also the first latchkey generation. In one generation, we went from Mom greeting us at the door with milk and cookies to Mom leaving a hastily dashed note and some money for ordering in… or forgetting us entirely.

I am sorry that makes it sound like I am blaming women for this whole thing. The changes involved involved all of society. Women had to escape domestic slavery, get jobs, and so on. Nothing else would have been acceptable.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t examine the consequences of this vital and absolutely necessary change and ask ourselves what impact it had on their kids.

So what happened when we grew up and had kids? We overcompensated by becoming hyper involved “helicopter parents”. We went into parenting determined that our kids would not feel neglected,. resented, and forgotten, and instead raised them to feel scrutinized. paranoid,. and like they are always in the spotlight.

Each generation overcompensates for the mistakes of the last.

I can feel those same emotions in myself. even though in order to have less chance of becoming a parent I would have to become a eunuch. I have intuitively known since my late teens that I would probably be an overprotective parent.

When I imagine myself parenting, all I can think of is how badly I would want to reassure my kids that I was there for them, that I loved and cherished them and considered them valid and important, and that they would never be abandoned to their own devices and left to cope with the cruel and callous world alone.

Now if that doesn’t sound like a formula for a helicopter parent, I don’t know what does.

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Technically, that linve above represents a topic and/or mode switch this time instead of the usual time gap. but whatever.

Had therapy today. Was a pretty good session. My therapist is pushing me to deal with and express my anger, and that’s exactly what I need right now.

Because like he said, without dealing with all the rage and bitterness I have been holding inside for so long, my recovery is going to be very,very slow.

I resemble that remark.

I have so much anger inside me from all the years I spent so vastly emotionally disconnected that I never dealt with my un-fun emotions at all,. and actually went around thinking that things like jealousy, the desire for personal glory. the urge to compete hard with others, and all the rest of the reptile id emotions were the sort of thing that happened to other people, not me.

You know, all those sad, shortsighted, petty, fractious people who would be so much happier if they could fill their hearts with love, understanding, and forgiveness and understand that we are all in this together on this big mudball we call Earth.

You know…. like me.

And I think that hints at the route of the problem : I don’t want to think of myself as one of “those” kinds of people. I don’t want to face the fact that I have all those emotions I have disdained as unworthy and that to truly be that angelic version of myself, I have to engage with and deal with those emotions and finally get around to integrating them into my personality like everyone must do at some point.

I’m just doing it around thirty years later than most.

Well. there had to be some compensation for the fact that I was so far ahead of everybody else in other ways. It’s like I used the character points meant to make me a well rounded person and spent them all in one or two areas instead.

That’s another topic we covered in therapy today was the lack of challenge in my life. I dont think I had ever really explained it to my therapist before. How the fact that school was always ludicrously, even insultingly easy for me and how I have never sweated a test or worried about marks at all.

It’s like a strange frictionless world with no resistance and no push back. And my life is still like that to this very day. I found the schoolwork at both Kwantlen and VFS to be absurdly easy and I have to wonder at my ability to get good marks when I am truly half-assing the work most of the time.

I am just that brilliant and talented, I guess.

So why doesn’t that make me feel any better?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And that’s a bigger deal than you might think.

Because there’s more at stake than some abstract sense of wisdom that comes from self-examanation (the unexamined life is probably better) or a sense of wholeness and wellbeing that comes from really getting to know yourself, you know, as a person.

No the problem arises when people make promises based on faulty or incomplete self knowledge. These promises and commitments and such all hinge on a person’s ability to predict how they will feel in the future, and we naked beach apes are notoriously bad at that. Heck, even the smartest among us have trouble even imagining being in a mood other than the one we are currently in.

And when we can, it is generally only in the abstract. This is necessary for mood stability in most people, but it can lead to very poor long term choices.

I am not saying that people are idiots. Far from it. This is an observation on human nature. Everyone has that problem.

Even high IQ types like me.

Back to the main event : faulty self-knowledge.

Let’s take a common example : the abusive partner in a relationship who keeps saying they are going to change but never does.

The problem is that when they say that, they are not lying. It passes the sincerity test. They honestly believe they are going to change and things are going to be different from now on and everything will be okay.

And so the abused partner,. sensing their total sincerity, takes them back. And for a while, they keep their word and things are okay.

But then they go back to their abusive ways. And the abused person puts up with it for a while because they want to believe that the person has changed and this was just a minor slip up.

Before long,. they are right back to the abused partner listening to the abuser beg them to stay and sincerely promising to change.

And all because the abuser is sincere when they promise to change.

I could go into how easy it is to mean what you say when, on some level, you know you will not mean it later, but that’s some crazy-making shit and not relevant to the topic.

The thing is, the abuser does not know why they abuse. In fact, odds are, even if they feel bad about it, deep down they still think it is all justified by what the victim(s) have done to them and that they are actually just the innocent victims in this.

That’s a necessary part of the structure of an abusive behaviour pattern. Without a very strong sense of justification, the abuser would have to face their own evil and admit to themselves they hurt people for no good reason.

Anyhow (boy I say that a lot), my point is that the pattern of abuse is based on a lack of self-knowledge on the part of the abuser. If they knew and understood themselves better, they would get that the things that set them off are going to happen again and that they have to work on that.

Another, even higher stakes example of this is marriage.

A young couple madly in love with one another is completely incapable of imagining that ever changing. Romantic love is. in ways both wondrous and worrisome, completely overwhelming to those involved, and our sense of restraint and our wisdom do not stand a chance against the onslaught of emotions.

And that is lovely in theory. And, I presume, in practice. This passion for one another is the fire in which the bond of a future relationship together is formed.

The problem comes when the people are not, in fact, compatible. Once those emotions are in play, even couple that any intelligent stranger can tell do not belong together can end up creating a strong temporary bond.

So they get married, and settle down, maybe even (heaven forbid) have kids. But the clock is ticking because those heavy chemicals that flooded their brains when they were falling in love have worn off and their fundamental incompatibility shines through.

But they don’t want to face it. Neither of them wants to admit they made a huge, huge mistake. So the relationship goes on for a while, coasting on its own momentum.

Eventually. the wheels come off the bus entirely and they enter the unholy hell phase of their dying relationship. where they hate each other’s guts and fight all the time and basically the only thing holding the marriage together is spite. Neither of them wants to let the other one “win”. And fighting with one another, as horrible as it is, is pretty much the only form of intimacy they have left.

Then comes the divorce, and things, unbelievable. get even worse.

It is a story that plays itself out for millions of people all over the world. regardless of cultural tradition or religion. and it’s a tragedy that could have been avoided entirely if only the two people knew themselves well enough to see it coming.

Of course, there are lots of other scenarios like this. Society is, on one level. a series of interconnected promises, and they are all based on incomplete self-knowledge.

Like the politician who promises big changes then gets into office and ends up being just another lapdog of the rich, or worse.

They too mean what they say when they make those promises. From the outside, reform seems like the simplest thing possible.

But then they get into office and the job is more complicated and difficult and draining and boring than they anticipated and the system makes sure to keep them busy with official functions and other things designed to inflate their sense of status so that they don’t identify with the folks back home any more. and the reforms they were elected to perform get lost in the shuffle, until one day they realize they have not even thought about changing anything in a very long time.

Why would they change a system that is treating them so well?

And so forth and so on. All throughout society. people make sincere promises that. if they only knew themselves a little better. they would know that they can’t keep/

And I have no idea how to fix it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow/.

Let’s try thinking past the problem.

If I wasn’t sick, I would work hard every day to transform the life I have into the one I want. I would hunt up freelance work until my slate was full and then I would spend eight hours a day doing said paid work, almost as if I was employed or something.

As part of that, I would also be hunting for a permanent position somewhere that can use my considerable talents. I am one hell of a writer, and there must be some place in this crazy world that can make use of my gifts in exchange for money.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?

If I wasn’t sick, I would have both energy. and the physical robustness to use it. I would spend all day working like hell on things I love and I would not be plagued by random mood crashes, withering of willpower, lack of purpose and propulsion, and all the other million and a half things that keep me from realizing my potential.

If I wasn’t sick, I would realize my potential.

If I wasn’t sick, I would remain focused and driven by purpose intead of always going out of phase with reality and then having to drag myself back to the here and now.

If I wasn’t sick, my world would be crystal clear and my will and my purpose and my concentration would all be how I want them to be when needed.

If I wasn’t sick, the fog in my mind would clear, like night mists burned away by the morning sun. I would be able to think clearly for the first time in a long time. I would be i full command of all my abilities all the time, and be able to command works into existence by focusing my will towards my goals and not letting go until I got what I wanted out of life.

If I wasn’t sick, I would be able to focus, period.

If I wasn’t sick, I would have a wide circle of freinds and acquaintances. I wouild be the sort of personable person everyone likes, and I would learn how to get along with anybody and everybody, just like my father. I would know lots of cool and interesting people and be able to draw on that when I need people to help me with whateer project I have going.

If I wasn’t sick, I’d have my own coterie of weirdos.

If I wasn’t sick, I would get a lot more exercise. Because I am in good health, exercise would be a lot less painful and dangerous and I would be free to enjoy the muscular relief of tension, endorphins, and many other joyful things about exercise.

If I wasn’t sick, I would be buff as hell, with my body in peak condition and free of all the weird little pains and aches and other nastiness to which my current body is prone.

If I wasn’t sick, there would be so much less pain in my life.

If I wasn’t sick, I wouldn’t need to nap now.

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If I wasn’t sick, I would go on dates.

Lots of dates. I would sample what was out there so I could get a clearer pictures of just exactly what it is I want. I mean, I have a fairly good idea what I want in a guy now, but without field testing, it is hard to tell the difference between theory and practice.

If I wasn’t sick, I would find a guy who understood me when I talked like that.

If I wasn’t sick, I would sleep around. Some of those dates would lead to the boudoir and I would get to try to catch up with my raging lust and expend all that pent up sexual energy I have inside. I would finally move past the masturbation phase of sexual development and get me some of all that hot cock out there.

Including going to the baths. Now that I am neither crushingly shy or claustrophobic, thre is nothing keeping me from going to a gay bath house like Steamworks on the busiest night of the week and helping myself to all the sucking and fucking I want until I am satiates and spent and perhaps a tad dehydrated.

I might even try out a kink or two, see if I can get others interested. And I should be able to. Without the fear making me send out subconscious “get the fuck away from me” signals, my natural charisma and charm would dominate, unfiltered, and I would become a pretty popular dude despite my obesity.

Confidence and attitude. That’s what it’s all about.

In fact, if I wasn’t sick, I would be one kickass dude. Charm, wit, personality, erotic magnetism, I would have it all, and without bad tapes and punishing society anxiety filling up my head and getting in the way.

If I wasn’t sickm I would have no trouble landing me a good man. I would finally be social enough to meet lots of new people and that combined with my charms would insure that I can “play the field” in search of a mate. Maybe even a husband.

If I wasn’t sick, I could get married. It could totally happen.

So if I wasn’t sick, I could get me a wider social group, a permanent job. and a husband with whom to share wedded, domestic bliss.

That is my formula for success. That is the life of which I dream. Nothing that lots of other people don’t have without having the slightest idea what it’s like to be too sick to even try to get.

If I wasn’t sick, I would be whole. Complete. Comfortable in my own skin. Strong, and confident, and focused. I would be a real person, in other words, finally getting what others takle for granted.

If I wasn’t sick, I could finally live a normal life.

If I wasn’t sick, I would be happy.

Too bad I’m so sick.