I’ve only had two hours of sleep. I knew it was a mistake to have Diet Coke with breakfast, but I did it anyway. And the thing is, I am not at all tired.

And that’s the problem. Clearly I have entered a hypo-manic phase. I have these from time to time. I feel fine…. great, in fact. The fact that the sun is shining for the first time in a week probably has something to do with that.

Reminds me of the episode of Northern Exposure where Joel gets a case of midnight sun madness where he is super hyper and energetic as a result of experiencing the first nightless 24 hours of his life.

He goes around all chipper and chatty like he’s a toddler on a triple espesso until, as he was warned, he runs out of energy all of a sudden and falls asleep in the street.

And that’s how this shit tends to work for me. I will feel fine and dandy (though not as dandy as I would like) for a while and then I will run out of energy and sleep a LOT.

Fair enough. It all works out the same in the end. I will just borrow some wakefulness from the future and pay it off in installments.

Then again, I will have some time this afternoon to at least try to sleep. And these things are unpredictable. I might fall fast asleep once I finish my lunch (beef teriyaki donburi, yum!) and lie still for a while with some cool music on.

I hope so. That would be a lot better than waiting for this thing to crumble with no idea of when that will be. I would rather get it over with ASAP.

One amusing little thing about my most recent sushi adventure : when my food arrived, I was super hungry. So what is the first thing I grab after I put everything down?

Broccoli. I grabbed a broccoli out of the donburi. Not the beef, or the rice, or all that tasty sushi I ordered. Broccoli. For some reason, when I saw that broccoli, something in my mind said “YES. THAT. NOW. ” and I nabbed it and ate it and it tasted marvelous.

Presumably. I really needed some vitamin A and/or D.

Now I have never been a broccoli hater. Patient readers know that I was never forced to eat anything as a kid and as a result, I never developed a hatred for vegetables or other healthy type foods.

Broccoli wouldn’t exactly make it into the top twenty of my favorite foods list, but it’s fine. And chock full of vitamins, so it makes me FEEL healthy when I eat it.

In general, I love veggies. Carrots and celery especially. Sure, they don’t hit the magic reward button in your head as hard as some of our most delicious nutritional villains, but they still taste pretty darn good to me.

Except arugula. That shit’s nasty.

Fuck arugula, man. There, I’ve said it.

I will be back later on.

More thoughts on the whole what it means to have a high IQ thang.

For one thing, it means nobody wants to hear about your goddamned problems. There is a flaw in human social programming (the hardwired kind) that makes it hard to care about the problems of those we perceive as superior to us in some sense.

For instance, there are genuine problems that cause real suffering and pain that are unique to rich people. But nobody wants to hear about those because rich people are not a protected class and inspire jealously in others, and for most people, that cancels out their empathy almost entirely.

Nested within that is a very deep and potent dream we all share that money would solve all our problems. It’s a popular dream because it reassures us that our problems are solvable but places the blame on our lack of money and not ourselves.

And rich people are held hostage to that dream, in ways both obvious and subtle. They feel the pressure to be as happy as society expects them to be, and yet they are still mortal flawed humans, and this often cajuses them enormous frustration.

The real truth is that money doesn’t solve the important problems. You can’t buy real love or genuine friendship or the true admiration of your peers.

It can buy you status but it can’t buy the kind of respect a truly strong and noble person gets. It can give people a reason to come over to the mansion but it can’t make that reason be because people are interested in and appreciate you as a person. It cnas send the kids to the best schools but it can’t make them love you for it.

Looked at that way. rich people don’t have it all that much better than anyone else, and in some ways,. they have it worse.

And it’s the same with high IQ. Nobody wants to hear about the problems that come with a high IQ because they are too busy being jealous to listen. It confuses the hell out of our social programming to hear that those you think have it better than you have the same amount of problems you do. We want to beleive that those above us on whatever scale have it easy.

That way, our total lack of empathy for them is justified.

But I dohn’t buy it. I think everyone deserves the same care, understanding, and respect, no matter how we feel about their position relative to us in the social hierarchy, and that means caring for the rich – and the bright – every bit as much as we do the poor and the dim.

I have been a victim of this lack of empathy for those “above” you my whole life. I have repeatedly been the victim of the jealousy of others when I was doing nothing to hurt anyone except be myself.

IBut when you make people feel inferior, they take it out on you any chance they get even if you are doing nothing wrong.

So if my excellence makes you feel insecure, tough titties. Suck it up, buttercup, because that’s your problem, not mine.

And if you try to come at me, you better pack a fucking chainsaw.

no wonder so many people like me become bitter misanthropists!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I swear I was mentally competent at lunch time. But now it’s like I have a wet blanket on my brain and I just can’t.

It’s annoying but also somewhat amusing, truth be told. There might be something to this recreational stupidity that potheads seem so keen on.

I can’t deny the possibility that I would be happier if I was just a little stupider.

Not that I think stupid people are happier than smart people. I mean, it’s true that depression skews towards the high IQ crowd, but the stupid have their problems too.

They’re just stupider problems.

But given all my talk of my brutal truth machine (totally the name of my industrial band) in yesterday’s blog entry, I can’y deny that the fucking thing would probably break down for good if I shaved ten points off my IQ.

And then I wouldn’t have this nightmare mechanism I have created picking me apart constantly and torturing me with the “truth”.

Might be the best thing for me.

Maybe that’s why some people become serence as they grow old. At some point, they lose just enough of their faculties to knock out their overactive superegos, and from that point on everything is A-OK.

I can hardly wait.

I’d have to say that my mood at the moment is not quite as good as yesterday’s lighter side of meh, but that is probably just low blood sugar. I should take a break and have a snack. But I don’t want to ruin my appetite for the sushi I have ordered.

Due to my current state of mental impairment, it took me over twenty minutes just to decide what the hell I wanted from the sushi place. I kept dithering over my order. I would complete my order, then change my mind,. then complete it again. and so forth and so on, each time making it all the way to the page where you actually order the stuff before backtracking and starting over.

And I am not normally that much of a ditherer. Especially when it’s something as discrete and logical as a restaurant order. That’s the sort of thing my brutal truth machine can usually hash out pretty fast.

In fact, it is exactly the sort of quantitative judgment exercise I enjoy, and I am normally pretty darn good at them.

But my executive function is impaired right now, and so I dithered.

To be honest, those are my two speeds : either operating swiftly and decisively with machine like efficiency and high quality results, or endless painful dithering and soul searching as if I am trying to make Sophie’s fucking Choice.

Which is like Taster’s Choice, but with nazis.

I think it all boils down to the nature of the variables plus my mood. If the variables are all easily understood and fixed, and my mind is not bogged down with negative emotions or otherwise prepared, then I can be all swift and sure and shit.

But if I have to make the decisions without those easy (for me) to deal with variables, then I got nothing. I have to make the decisions based on emotion, and that gets into the whole “what do I want?” quagmire, and things get worse from there.

I am no good at emotional reasoning. I can solve all the world’s problems in my head, but like a certain Vulcan, ask me an emotion based question and I am stumped.

Of course, that makes me think of this :

I don’t know what I want. The question makes me brain crash. I either don’t have an answer or have so many answers flooding my mind at the same time that it is impossible for me to pick one.

Gah. Even now, after writing all this AND hydrating AND taking a B100 pill (time released B vitamins) AND eating an apple, I am still so sleepy that I almost nodded off in mid-sentence.

I have been fighting back sleep for a while now, actually. It’s so stressful. I hate being in this mental state. Awake, but unable to think straight, so I can’t generate the kind of consciousness to which I am accustomed and instead I feel like I am a drunk trying to find his way home when he can barely see straight and the world appears to be rocking and reeling like he was aboard a ship in the middle of a hurricane.

I guess tt’s sort of weirdt that I can’t figure out my sushi order but I can write that kind of image without much effort.

Different parts of the brain.

Plus, I haven’t been ordering sushi every day since 2011 like I have been doing with this writing of mine.

I mean. I would if I could. Sushi’s awesome. And I don’t even like fish. But there is no way I could afford it.

Right now, I am happily nomming on the sushi which just arrived. I have kappa maki (not a fraternity, a cucumber roll), yam tempura roll (SO GOOD), and chicken teriyaki roll. And of course, lots of soy and wasabi.

I don’t usually use the pickled ginger. It tastes fine but I find it distracts from the flavour of the sushi rather than adds to it.

But I looooooove wasabi. I seem to be attracted to highly aromatic flavours, meaning flavours that are strongly based on scent.

Apparently. when the aromatic elements of the food rise up from the food in my mouth, permeate the palate, enter the nasal chamber, and are inhaled, I go yum.

So things like wasabli,. onion, garlic, mint, and curry make me happy.

Lots of other things too, of course. There’s no aromatic component to most ice cream flavours and I sure as heck love ice cream.

You know, I could go Google “wasabi ice cream” and see if that’s a thing.

But you know what? I’m good. I am serene in my faith that it does exist. I habve total confidence that it is a thing the world has already produced.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I think I did myself some good with yesterday’s anger dump. Whatever I can do to let that shit out of my skull is going to be good for me in the long run.

I feel like I have only barely scratched the surface, of course. But baby steps.

Right now I feel sort of in between-ish. Like I am between moods. Just waiting at the station for the next mood bus to come along and pick me up.

And it leaves me on the lighter side of meh. So not bored or disaffected or in general unimpressed with and uninterested in life.

Just feeling thoughtful and introspective and philosophical. A navel gazing mood.

But like.. moreso than usual.

I have at least gotten to the point where I can remember what an awesome person I am without wincing. Yesterday was wincing time. Like the thought of my own fabulousness was simply too loud for me to endure.

I am nothing if not complex.

I still don’t really know how to wrap my mind around the truth of what a neato dude I am. The urge to reject the fact is strong. It just doesn’t fit in with all the self-loathing that I still have inside and really challenges the whole way I see my world and my life.

And that’s like…. hard.

But I am not the sort of person who can simply bury or wish away unwelcome truths. Who knows, maybe I would be saner if I was.

I am increasingly convinced that a capacity for self-delusion is vitally necessary for mental health as it allows the mind to protect its integrity by internally generating whatever inputs the mind needs in order to remain balanced.

The truth is that the human mind cannot afford to simply swallow all truths without bias or screening. To be “naked before the truth”, like I have called it before, is actually a really bad idea. It’s the equivalent of being naked in a snowstorm.

No, you see, this life-threatening frostbite is proof I am “keeping it real”.

Better miserable than deluded, right? RIGHT?

I am not sure there is a cure for my intellectually impeccable but emotionally annihilating addiction to the truth and nothing but the truth. Like I have said so many times before, it is logically impossible to willingly accept delusion.

But maybe things don’t have to be so black and white. Maybe I can bend inside enough to allow there to be degrees of truth in my life, and degrees of importance to those truths, and maybe, just maybe, it’s okay to de-prioritize truths that hurt me.

Or at the very least, maybe I can give myself permission to not think about them.

I can certainly say that my faith – which is all it ever was – that you are always better off knowing the truth has been shaken to its core.

Or maybe I am just fooling myself.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

I will be back later.

Due to circumstances unforseen and complex, I now have only 45 mins in which to write the other 500 words of my daily bloggination.

No problem. I wrote a million words in 11 months. I think I will be just fine.

Although the allergy attack I am having right now ain’t helping much.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, freeing myself from the cold claws of my brutal truth machine of a brain.

The thing is, there is a great feeling of power that comes from having such a powerful and incisive mind. I feel like a demigod sometimes (not a god…. that would be crazy!) when I think about how much more clearly and precisely I see things than most people and how my mind blasts away bullshit and sweeps away false paths in order to get directly to the truth without hesistation or delay.

Also without mercy or forgiveness or the slightest consideration for the effect this ruthless pusuit of the truth will have on the owner and operator of that goddamned machine, namely little ol’ me, the monkey at the controls.

In the spirit of intellectual ruggedness and a very austere and abstract definition of virtue, I declared such petty considerations as the effect on my psyche of this brutal truth seeking to be beneath my Olympian self, and have pursued the truth with total disregard for all other concerns since then.

And I don’t know how to stop. God help me, I don’t know how to stop.

Because underneath it all is a powerful need to know. A need so powerful, in fact, that it overpowers all else. When I ever try to imagine not being such an inhumane monster about the whole thing, my mind comes to a screeching smoking halt because if I was not like that, I would have to settle for not knowing. .

And that’s an unthinkable thought. Tilt, game over, does not compute, danger Will Robinson. How could I do anything without knowing?

The answer is “with faith”, and we all know that’s not something I possess. More’s the pity. I would be much better off if I had a healthy amount of it.

Not necessarily a religious sort of faith either. Just a general trust that on the whole the world is an okay place and that I do not need to constantly be on guard and probing everything logically in order to feel safe.

And I still don’t feel safe.

But I get as close as I know how to get with this over-torqued brain of mine.

I have essentially conquered my little world via enormous expenditures of sheer intellectual muscle, and there is no room for another path to truth left in me.

So I don’t know how to go without knowing. 

I don’t know how to install some goddamned safety controls on this big bad brutal truth machine of mine.

I don’t know how to truly trust anyone or any thing.

But I am willing to explore.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Harry the Dragon never, ever, EVER breathed fire.

Not Harry. Not even once.

But dragons generate fire just by living. And so Harry had decades worth of fire built up inisde him that he refused to let out.

And so it made him very sick all the time.

Got talking about my anger issues in therapy today. How I have all this latent rage built up inside me with virtually no outlet, and how until I find a way to deal with that, my progress will continue to be slow and painful.

All true. I cannot deny a word of it. I would be a hell of a lot better off if I found some way to vent all this fucking anger inside me and thereby reduce the pressure level in my overcharged emotional coping mechanisms.

But I’m too scared.

I used to say that my main problem with expressing anger was that I didn’t want to be like my father, taking his anger out on others instead of dealing with it himself.

And that’s definitely still in there. But it’s not the real problem. The real problem is that I am too scared of my own dark thoughts to risk opening the floodgates of my rage.

Except that’s probably bullshit too. It’s probably just my depression’s away of keeping me from getting relief from it. All it has to do is raise the specter of me being a raging lunatic (or worse, an asshole) whenever I even contemplate venting my spleen and I freak out and slam those floodgates shut extra hard, and run off to hide.

Such mouslike timidity.

The truth is that I really don’t know what would happen if I opened those floodgates. And that’s the really scary part. Nothing is scarier than the unknown, and the human mind can’t help but view any kind of large, unpredictable change to itself as a form of death. And venting my rage would change a LOT, I think.

I might become a totally different person without this unstable nuclear reactor of fulminating rage eating away at me 24/7.

And that scares the hell out of me.

Maybe what I need to do is let the rage pass through me and out of me without interference. Let it go like a lance of fire stabbing into the night sky in a torrent of raging exploding flame, and hope that works.

I think it would help some, but not really solve anything. It’s not going to be that easy. Not by a long shot.

I am not going to be able to get away with releasing the rage without having to actually express it. It’s a nice thought but it’s a pipe dream, like weight loss without sacrifice or success without self-discipline.

They’re kind of the same thing.

No, the truth is that I am going to have to find at least one way to actually express all that molten rage inside me, and being who I am, the main one was always going to be through words. Through writing.

I feel safe and in control when I write.

So here goes with venting some of my dark thoughts.

Lately they have been very…. non-egalitarian. I have been dodging intellectual elitism for a very long time. And I suppose I thought this was some sort of noble choice I was making, but it wasn’t.

Mostly. it was a side benefit of a dead and disconnected id.

Now that I am repairing that id connection, I am getting surges of rage and frustration and the urge to destroy.

And underneath it all is the urge to scream, “Listen up, all you dumb motherfuckers! Listen to me because I am smarter than any three of you put together and if the world was a fair place you all would be showing me a hell of a lot more respect! Now bow down to me and kiss my ass and I might decide you deserve to be educated by a vastly superior mind so you drooling halfwits can learn to actually think for a change!”.

Ugly thoughts, I know, but better out than in, I guess.

Turn out, I am mad about a lot of things, and one of the biggest is how my life has turned out. Deep down I think I deserve way better than I have gotten out of life, and it pisses me off that depression has devoured my entire adult life and doesn’t look like it is going to spit me out any time soon, and that’s just not fucking fair.

I don’t deserve this. I’m an amazing guy. And I have so much to offer the world. But because I have a head full of bad wiring, I am stuck here living in my own goddamned filth and wasting my life playing goddamned video games because I just plain can’t deal with anything and so I have to hide from everything.

And it makes me so mad I want to scream. I should be super successful by now. With my abilities, I could have kicked ass in any one of a hundred different fields and be enjoying the fruits of my success right about now, instead of living in poverty and squalor stuck like a dog turd to society’s shoe.

I could be making amazing things happen with my amazing abilities. I could be writing and producing hilarious and heartwarming television, or traveling the world as a public speaker imparting my insights and stirring up debate. Or I could be running my own think tank, or high level consulting firm. I could be advising heads of state, or working with scientists on world-saving inventions.

Hell, I could be a hedge fund manager making millions for myself every day using other people’s money and spending my time sucking rented cock on a tropical island and drinking elaborate rum cocktails.

But no. Instead, I am a nothing nobody and it is all due to this fucking depression.

And that really pisses me off.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Becaue my depression has gotten a lot worse lately.

Not to the point where I am at risk of self-harm, thank goodness. This is not that kind of depression. This is something…. different.

I feel like I am falling down an infinite hole within myself, and as I fall I get smaller and weaker and dimmer, and somehow I know that this will continue until I end up watching the tiny tiny spark that is all that is left of me wink out of the night sky, lost forever.

I feel like I am trying to flee from everything in every direction at the same time, and that the pressure created by this infinite retreat just keeps building and building within me, making me feel crazier and crazier.

Sooner or later, something is going to give. The dam will burst, the seams will split, the rivets will pop like popcorn and the whole great steel beast in whose belly I live will give out one last big groan before dying.

Dunno what happens to me then. Nothing good, I would imagine.

If only I knew how to stop running. How to overcome all this fear and turn and face all those ghosts chasing me and maybe even chase them for a change.

Anyone got a power pellet?

But I really feel like the depression has me by the balls lately. And the throat. I feel so very weak and cold and helpless. My soul feels threadbare and thin and the darkness inside me has never been this deep…. or inviting.

I keep thinking about retreating even further from reality than I already do. But that’s hard to even imagine because I already have a very low reality existence.

Where else can I go? What else can I do?

Lapse into a coma?

Maybe I need some institutional time. Some time spent somewhere where I can get intensive treatment for a couple of weeks might do me a lot of good.

I know one thing : I can’t do this all by myself any more.

I never really could, to be honest. This depression of mine is too much for a depressed person to be able to handle.

But I have repeatedly hidden this truth from myself because, well, then what? So I can’t do this all by myself. What’s the alternative?

Doing it with others?

I wish I could believe that was possible.

I wish I had faith that there are people out there who can help me. Truly help me. People with wisdom I can use. People with power I can borrow. People with knowledge that I lack.

People whose love I can feel.

But I gave up on that a long time ago. I know that is very unhealthy, but it is nevetheless true. There was a time in my life when I still looked for true connection in the world, the kind that would banish all my loneliness and make me feel seen and understood at last.

That lasted till maybe Grade 9.

After that, I gave up. Nobody can actually handle all that I am. People get around as much of me as I think they can handle and that’s it. Nobody sees more than a slice of me because I know that if I exceed their load limit, they will flee.

It’s not their fault. They have no choice. They have to do that just to survive. Otherwise the sheer oppressive weight of my personality would smother and crush them.

I’ve always had for more power than I knew how to handle. And there was never anybody around to teach me how to handle it.

Nobody who could reach me, anyhow.

But that’s a whole other….. thing.

So I guess I am just stuck here, freezing to death in a world with no clothes. Feeling deathly still and quiet inside, unsure whether this means I am dying, or just tired.

Probably a bit of both.

It’s times like these that I wish I could stick my metaphorical finger down my psychological throat and make myself throw up all the badness and pain and emotions gone toxic in storage and all the rest of this wretched ragout inside me so I could purge myself and, for a little while at least, be empty and clean.

But I am pretty sure that doesn’t happen except maybe at those ayuasca retreats.

Remember Encounter Groups? I don’t, except as a name for something that was going on in the 70’s.

But I read about them today and apparently they involved a lot of different forms of non-sexual body intimacies. People rubbing, touching, caressing, and speaking soothingly to one another, as well as the more usual group therapy type stuff.

The idea was to reconnect with our time as infants and children and try to heal some of the deep emotional injuries that keep us from being happy adults.

And a lot of that revolved around disabling the terribly destructive stigma that say needing to touch and be touched by others is somehow infantile and weak and therefore deeply shameful in an adult.

Especially an adult man.

And this seems like a potentially devastatingly effective form of interpersonal therapy, so it makes me wonder where it went.

What happened in the 80’s to make us all reject this kind of (literally) touchy-feely stuff?

And it also makes me wonder about how hyper cuddly I am as Fruvous and how furry culture in general is far more open to all forms of intimacy than the mainstream, and what that means about us and about me.

Are our animal personas a way for us to bypass the bad programming and reconnect with a more simple and honest existence?

Even our sexually open-minded ways can be seen as an attempt to return to a time of innocent pleasure before all the complicated shame and taboos came along to bind and complicate our simple joys.

I know that when I say I use Fruvous to express things I can’t express in my real life, that definitely includes the need for physical affection in all its forms.

There are so many harmful and unnecessary walls keeping us from being whole.

I consider it my duty to try to break those down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My god, winter is depressing.

No wonder all those Scandanavian coutries have high suicide rates. Those people have the highest standard of living in the whole world and yet, winter kills them via suicide.

Here on the Wet Coast, we are experiencing real winter for the first time this season. There’s snow on all the roads. Its been heavily overcast all day. It’s cold as hell outside, at least by the local standards.

And I have slept for most of today and yet I am still sleepy and would dearly love to just crawl back into bed and take a brief one year nap.

It’s like I am beginning to hibernate. All I wanna do is sleep until it’s nice out again.

But of course, it isn’t that simple. As ursinoid as I am in the real world, I am still a human being and humans do not, officially, hibernate.

We may semi-hibernate, though. At least those of us whose genetic heritage is from northern, temperate climes. It would make sense for us to have an exaggerated need for sleep in the winter time as that would reduce metabolic demand and hence make us need less food over time in the winter and that would increase our chances of making it to the spring.

So there are definite advantages to a lot of winter napping. We can’t truly hibernate – that requires a lot of specialized biological hardware and programming and human beings are generalists,. not specialists.

But we can sleep a lot.

That’s also a hunting adaptation. There is a reason why your cat sleeps so much. It’s because cats are pure predators and predators are geared towards slow stalking of prey followed by rapid, high energy chase and pounce, and then huge high energy meals that take a long time to digest.

Ergo, the smart thing to do is to sleep and let your body devote all its energies to digestion, and live off all that meat you devoured until that runs out and it is time to go hunt up some food again.

Makes me think of a bunch of primitive hunter-gatherer types after the big feast/orgy that followed a successful hunt, sleeping in a big pile like kittens.

Sleeping all day always makes me depressed. I wish it didn’t, but it does. It makes me feel like hours of my life are being stolen and wasted when I would rather be up and doing something. even if that something is just playing video games.

I wish I could be all relaxed and happy and philosophical about the whole thing. After all, looked at from the right angle, all that sleep could be seen as an island of tranquility and relaxation and escape from the world.

But I am not that kind of person. It sometimes seems like I am,but I am not. I want to live, god damn it, and if that means I have to fight and bite and yell and scream, then that is what I am going to do.

I’ll be mellow when I am dead, motherfuckers.

I will be back later.

I must go poop.

Have pooped and napped. in that order and not at the same time.

I guess I should explain why I was offline for six days.

Here’s a little something that goes exactly like this :

1. My Internet died. Root cause : Ethernet cable failure. Well. shit.
2. After fretting about it for a few hours while playing Dragon Age Origins, I figure out that my best option is to order a USB WiFi adapter as that will be way easier to deal with and cheaper than getting another very long Ethernet cable. And weird as it sounds, this super sweet computer of mine did not come with Wi-Fi.
3. I hop on Amazon.ca to buy one. Found one that looked about right within a few minutes, so I order it. I want it ASAP, so I throw in an extra four bucks for Amazon Prime’s One Day Delivery.
4. First sign of trouble : I am ordering it on a Tuesday and it says it will arrive Thursday. No matter how you slice it, that’s two days, not one. Oh well.
5. Thursday rolls around, and nope, nothing. You mean I have to wait anothe day for this thing? Dammit. I check my email and Amazon emailed me to apologize and say it would arrive Friday or Saturday,
6. Friday : Also nothing. What the FUCK? It’s now been three days for my One Day Delivery, and I am a Prime customer and everything. And it’s not like it will arrive on a Saturday as it is coming via Canada Post and the only thing that would get postal workers out of bed on a Saturday is lighting their house on fire.
7. Saturday, Sunday : Yup. Nothing. On Sunday, I get an email from Amazon saying “your package may be lost, as it never takes this long to deliver anything!”. How reassuring. Before giving in to despair, however, I click the tracking link on the package and discover it arrived here in Richmond late Friday night.
8. Monday (today) : It arrives. I follow the instructions, install the drivers, plug the sucker in, put in our password, and voila, I am back.

Problem solved. But I am still pissed off about the delay. So I log in to Amazon.ca to complain, but that’s where I am stuck.

Because the clever bastards have set it up so that I can’t complain via email or anything like it. I can only bitch at them over the phone or in live chat.

And that was so unexpected that it totally triggered my social anxiety and so it is going ot take me a while to overcome that so I can bitch at them in realtime.

And this whole ordeal is part of a larger pattern of shit coming up to disrupt my life, like this cold that won’t go away and strange events making me miss my usual shopping opportunities so I run out of my small comforts, and things like that.

It all grinds down my fragile sense of safety, and as a result. I have felt depressed and anxious and stressed the fuck out.

Right now, I wish I could just check myself into some nice private institution where everything is nice a quiet and orderly and if I feel the need to scream and thrash around,they have a nice room with soft walls for just that purpose.

I am not sure I would get any healthier, but I would probably be happier.

And that’s what is really important, n’est-ce pas?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No, we’re NOT all okay, ya chirpy little twat.

I know I am not. And patient readers know that being “not okay” is something I find very hard to admit.

Even when I am utterly miserable, my instinct is to say I am fine. The very idea of telling people how I really feel makes me break out in a prickly sweat.

Now why is that?

Fundamentally, I think it comes down to havibng no faith that anyone can help me. And if nobody can help me, then admitting to my true feelings can’t possibly help and will probably end up hurting.

So why bother? Tell people whatever it takes to make them go away and leave me to suffer in solitude.

Oh, no, you don’t have to worry about me, I am fine. You jusrt go backj to your no doubt vastly superior life and leave me to be the weird little cipher in the dark that I am.

Unrelatedly, woe is me, for I am so very lonely.

It makes me wonder if it will ever be possible for me to let people in. My fear is that my traumatic and kindergarten-free early childhood means I missed a vital developmental window of time where I was supposed to get my primary socialization, and when I did not, it left me permanently damaged.

That would mean I am, in essence, emotionally and socially crippled. And that is a terrifying and depressing thought.

Lately everything just seems so dark.

Well, what if I am truly emotionally and socially broken? What then?

I’d have to figure out some way of dealing with it. What that might be, I don’t know.

How do you cope with having the same desire for human connection as any other naked beach ape, and yet you are permanently unable to get it?

Besides suicide, that is.

Just a thought.

I can’t afford to think my situation is hopeless. I have to believe that some day, if I keep going to therapy and wringting my emotions out onto these pages, the great wall of numbness and death inside me will be breached and I will finally be able to feel the wamrth and the love that people have for me, and I will no longer be so alone.

There are a lot of other reasons why I don’t tell people how I really feel. One is not wanting my pain to contaminate others with my toxicity.

As long as the pain stays in me, I can control it. Contain it. Guard it, in a way. Keep others from getting hurt.

If I let it out into the world, it can go on hurting people, who then go on to hurt other people, and so forth and so on until it spreads through the world like a plague.

What a terrible way that would be to go viral.

And if I keep all the pain to myself, I don’t have to deal with the deep deep shame I feel about it. Nobody has to know what a hideous beast I am underneath it all. I can go on pretending to me something wholesome and decent and worthy.

And if I do a good enough job of it, I will even be able to fool myself.

Another reason I don’t tell people how I really feel is that I can’t tolerate other people getting too close to me emotionally.

That’s where the bullet really hits the bone. Like any undersocialized monkey, on a deep animal level I freak the fuck out if I find others in my personal mind space and will then do anything it takes to get them the fuck out of there.

And that is a terribly malformed response. Sharing mind space with others is exactly what human connection is all about. If I can’t tolerate that then I am fucked, because that’s where the medicine I need to become well would have to come from.

No wonder I am so alone.

And if I go even further into this malformed response, I start to feel extremely aggressive. Like I want to utterly annihilate all my mental intruders, leaving nothing of them behind so that I might finally know inner silence.

And that scares the hell out of me. I have some very dark and powerful demons inside me. People don’t realize this because I never let them show.

But I have some deep down craziness that is capable of terrible things.

And that’s very hard to take. I can face my depression from time to time and take a good look at it and look it in the eye.

But the anger – the sea of seething, white hot annihilating rage that simmers within me – that I can barely acknowledge, let alone express.

But then again, maybe that’s just one of my depression’s dirty little tricks. It knows that it uses this internalized aggression as fuel and protects its supply by making me feel crazy with anger every time I try to let any of it out.

But there is so much of it. And its hurts so much. It’s so fucking hot and toxic, like plutonium laden lava.

Clearly, it has got to go. If I can get rid of it, a lot of the barrier between me and others will go with it.

Maybe that’s the real problem. If that barrier goes, people will truly be able to see me. They will truly “get in”. They will be able to walk around my mindspace, I will truly be violated and I can’t let that happen again.

Being raped at the age of 4 was violation enough for a lifetime.

I won’t let anyone touch me ever again.

And that is the bitter and lonely truth of it all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And bleh. And urf. And more than a little arrrgh.

Feeling that discontent pretty strongly today. I feel stifled, frustrated, and trapped. My irritated id makes me want to shake my fist at the sky and scream, possibly while gesticulating meaningfully with a spear made of bone.

I prefer bone, myself. So much easier to work with than stone.

I sure as heck don’t feel like blogging right now. I’d rather be asleep, to be honest, but that’s true of at least half my waking hours anyhow, so that’s not really news.

Slept for most of the afternoon except when I had to get up to pee, which I had to do like five times in six hours. So while I got plenty of sleep, it was medium quality at best.

I suppose I should take a sleeping pill so I can stay asleep longer and get that deep REM sleep that is so important for proper mental health.

But I probably won’t, which is stupid. Then again, what do you expect from someone whose brain is compromised by lack of sleep?

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

I have been trying to add at least a little regularity to my sleep schedule by making sure that no matter what, I have my breakfast at 6 am and go to bed at 7 am.

That seems to be working fine so far. But the other half of my sleep hygeine program, the cutting down on naps, is not so easily accomplished.

I really don’t know any other way to cope. I have grown dependent on using sleep as a way to reset my mood and thus rid myself of my accumulated stress and anxiety. Without that, I am quite sure it would be panic attack city.

And then there’s the other function of my frequent napping, which is to act as a fast forward button for my empty day. All those blank and lonely hours are a lot easier to deal with when they are broken into 1.5 to 3 hour chunks. It also makes the main joyful events of my day – namely meals – not seem so far apart, and it keeps the hours from stretching too far into the future in my mind so I don’t get freaked out by them.

That’s so very sad, I can’t even.

And over and over again, how meaningless and stupid my life is comes crashing down around my ears. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, with enormous gifts and massive potential, and all I do is play video games all goddamned day.

And I deserve better, you know? I am a heck of a guy, and I deserve some success in my life. But I am never gonna get it because I am hemmed in by all this fear and anxiety and dead scar tissue of the mind.

I am drowning within myself and I have lost my faith in dry land.

And it makes me feel so hostile sometimes. Like I am daring the world to fuck with me so I can justify blowing up at it. Like I really, really want someone to fight. Like I have a head full of crazy and no way to let it out.

Except for writing this blog, of course. That helps.

The other half of the angry feelings is the fear. The fear that makes me want to hide from the entire universe by slipping into nonexistance for a while. Anything to make the demons of fear and anxiety shut the fuck up for a while so I can catch my breath and clear my head and maybe get a grip on things for once.

Say, did I mention that I dreamed I was death?

It was some time last week. I dreamt that I went to this super secret meeting inside a boxcar in an old abandoned trainyard on a grey overcast winter’s day.

Actually, I think the boxcar was just the entrance to the place. Anyhow.

It was a meeting of discarded mythological figures. Demigods and deities and magical creatures that had once actively embodied aspects of the human soul but who now existed as mere abstractions, or wildly misunderstood figures of myth.

And I was death. I looked a lot like Will Arnett but thinner. And I had that Will Arnett smug guy attitude but completely without a trace of humour. Instead, I was angry, restless, defensive, and full of cynicism and contempt.

I don’t remember anything about the other participants in this little support group, but I remember when it came to my turn to speak, I said something like “Well I never wanted to be here. To be this… death. At least you guys have some idea where you came from. Me, I just sprung up out of nowhere. I don’t know why I am here or what I am supposed to be doing. All I want is to be able to just… let… go… ”

Then I was overcome with emotion and closed my eyes and shed some manly tears. And that’s all I remember.

What does it all mean? I don’t know. I have had that sort of catharsis dream before but never in such detail and never “in character” as someone else.

And why was I death but not Death? I very clearly remembering saying and knowing I was death but I also clearly remember not meaning it in the whole “skeleton with a scythe” kind of way.

Like I was a death but not THE death, maybe.

Either way, it was a dream I am glad I had because I feel like it got at something that I don’t consciously understand yet. By pondering the dream, I stand a chance of being able to follow that thing to its roots in my mind and hence figure it out.

Plus I like, never have dreams that cool and deep and detailed. So I am pleased with that. Finally, a dream with some production values.

It always feels really good to me to write down a dream.

I should do it more often.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And it means I might not make it to FRED. God damn it.

I woke up feeling wretched and not feeling up to going to FRED. But that is par for the course for me.

Every single time there is some actual,. genuine, leave the house type socialization on the horizon, I have to overcome that feeling. I always get the urge to tell everyone I am sick and not go.

And it wouldn’t be a total lie. A panic attack is a form of being sick. right?

But now that I am more awake, I realize that this time, I really am sick. Something in my throat is swollen and making it hard to swallow and there is this ache that starts in my throat and goes all the way down into my chest and my lungs.

Well that fucking sucks.

It especially sucks because I will still need to brave the cold in order to go do my usual Sunday shopping. Either that, or I will need to ask Joe to get me some stuff from 7-11, which would also suck because 1) it will be more expensive that way and 2) it means I won’t get my awesome sugar free desserts from Pricemart.

7-11 has sugar free ice cream, at least, but it’s not the same. Still,. that might seem like a lot less work to Joe than picking me up and taking me to Pricemart.

Either way, laaaaaame.

Philosophically, I find myself wondering whether this is the same cold that has never totally gone away for two weeks or if it’s a brand new strain here to make its Fruvous debut and really show up that pneumonia I had before.

And I still have not been able to make a doctor’s appointment, god damn it. I was pissed off but not that surprised when I didn’t get an answer when I called a bunch of times on Thursay because I know that my GP takes every other Thursday off.

And what possible reason could there be to pay the receptionist when he’s not in the office, other than people?

But I was very disappoined and pissed off when I couldn’t get an answer on Friday. And now I am extra pissed, because now it’s not just that pesky little cold that wouldn’t go away, it’s something making me feel seriously sick.

And there is something fundamentally depressing about my usual wretched feeling upon waking failing to go away this time.

That’s not the deal, man. That was never the deal.

So once more, being sick is going to make my life suckier and more stupid and cost me a great deal of my very limited social time.

This shit is getting out of band. I really really hope I don’t end up with pneumonia again. I made it through the first time by keeping myself busy with puzzles and games on my tablet and doing quite a remarkable job of not thinking about it too much.

But I don’t think I could do that again. This time, I would worry and freak out.

And that would make everything worse.

More on this later.

I feel somewhat better. The physical symptoms are the same but I have managed to get some good sleep so I am able to handle the pain much better.

I’ve ordered in. I figure I was going to spend money on supper either way, so I might as well treat myself.

But it turned out to be more complicated than I thought because I had no appetite at all. I could not think of a single kind of food that sounded good to be. Everything seemed “meh” in the extreme.

So I decided to scroll through the list of restaurants on SkipTheDishes.ca…

…to see if something jumped out at me, and something did.

The weird thing was, it was McDonald’s.

It was as if suddenly the clouds parted and a vision of a Big Mac shone like golden (arches) sunshine and the angels sang “Ee-ee-eat me!”.

So now a Big Mac meal with large fries and a large diet coke plus a carrot muffin are wending their way to me via the miracle of the modern gig economy.

As of the moment I am typing this, it is 21 minutes away.

And I won’t lie. it feels weird paying $20 for what I normally pay $12 at McD’s. That is eight bucks worth of convenience I am paying for. And the tiny Scotsman in my head rails against such extravagence.

But he can go fuck himself. If he had his way I would never have any fun. He’s the one I have to fight in order to buy brand name pop, for fuck’s sake.

The problem is that when my disability cheques were much smaller, and definitely when I was on welfare, he rules the roost. I had to be extremely parsimonious because I had so little money that I could not afford to waste a penny.

My compulsive optimization was, for once, functional.

But I have a lot more now. and I can totally afford the occasional indulgence. But in order to actually indulge myself, I have to drag that little bastard kicking and screaming all the way.

The thrift became deeply compulsive. And I can feel the beginnings of what make someone into a money hoarder in my mind. Because that part of my psyche, if it totally had its way, would still spend as little as possible and let the extra money build up so it can squat on it like a dragon.

Why? For emotional security. The bigger the pile of money, the more safe and stable I would feel. And that’s a dangerous road to go on because even if it starts off as a long term need for emotional security, it would rapidly become a topical remedy for negative emotions like any other addiction.

Feel bad? Add to the hoard! “Enough” is a dirty word! MUST ACCUMULATE.

Fuck THAT noise.

So I try to teach myself out of the compulsion by forcing myself to buy nice things for myself now and then.

It’s a work in progress.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m on it. And I am not sure that is a good thing.

The way I see it, there are two main paths to recovery for me. There is the path of peace, where I learn to love myself and strive to become harmonious with my life as it is right now and hope that by doing so, I will stop wasting so much personal energy on inner conflict and find peace, comfort, and strength from inner harmony.

And then there is the path of discontent, where I harness my rage and frustrations into the energy needed to make the kind of landmass-altering changes I need in order to get well. This manifests as a growing dissatisfaction with things the way they are in my life and that dissasisfaction builds to a fever pitch until a very useful crisis occurs where the rage is suddenly gone and I feel wonderful and I know I have made my mental cage a bit bigger, a bit roomier, and a lot less painful.

It has happened before.

It was very weird.

Those are the two paths I find myself choosing between, and it would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking I have to choose one and stick with it and thus increase the amount of inner conflict by adding yet another front to the war.

But I am the sworn and implacable enemy of all false dichotomies and thus I know better than to think I have to pick a side when both modes are useful.

One is just a lot more pleasant than the other.

And that makes it seem like I should forget the path of conflict and embrace only the path of peace. After all, the path of peace is one of increasing harmony and health and wellbeing, and the path of discontent goes in the exact opposite direction and leads to increasing pain, frustration, and rage.

So why not do the fun one exclusively?

But it’s not that simple. The path of peace is lovely but it doesn’t bring real change. Sometimes you really do have to destroy the old in order to give birth to the new. Some things simply cannot be done peacefully. They are inherently violent and painful and if you spend all your time trying to maintain inner peace at any cost, you will never get anywhere because there is too much inner baggage in the way.

Sometimes the only way to get freedom is by revolution, with all that entails.

Sometimes the only way out is through a sea of blood and fire.

Sometimes you have to embrace the pain and let it change you.

But the path of discontent can’t be followed exclusively either because it takes so much energy and does so much short term damage that it destroys its own motivation. Sooner or later, without some peaceful time in which to renew oneself, the impetus to keep doing will run out.

There goes your pilot light.

The only way around that is to become a very hard and severe person. And I won’t lie, there are times when I am really tempted. It would be so satisfying to say “fuck everyone but me” and become harsh and unforgiving of myself and others.

Be a real ball busting prick, in other words.

That would let me truly embrace the pain, jock style, but at the cost of becoming the sort of person I despise.

I am not saying there isn’t something I could learn from that kind of person. But I sure as hell don’t want to turn into one.

The temptation comes from my highly repressed and underexpressed id. The id always wants nothing more than to ditch the ego and superego and express itself without restraint in a huge glorious release.

And that’s what embracing my dark side would be, essentially. It would mean taking all my dark angry thoughts and handing them a blank check to do whatever the fuck they want as long as it gets me ahead.

Clearly, the answer lies somewhere between the two paths.

I mean, I am fully prepared to embrace ambition and greed if I am the only one getting hurt by it. But I can’t see a way of keeping the damage to myself. I will invariably hurt people because I will be bossy as hell. merciless, selfish, and possessed of enough cleverness and empathy to really know how to hurt people.

I’d rather be a dreamer, thank ye kindly.

But you can’t live on your ideals. Or at least I can’t. My ferocious pragmatism will always demand action and results.

And somewhere underneath all my flabby passivity lies a great and terrible craving for everything – better lifestyle, higher status,. huge gobs of money, and sex sex sex…- that I have been denied by life so far.

I’m no angel. I want all that shit too. Gimmie gimmie gimmie!

But I truly want it all, because I want to get all that AND keep my soul.

Althought I must admit, the older I get, the less that last point matters to me. Perhaps that’s a sign that I too can become old and greedy and mean just like the Boomers.

But dammit, I want stuff.

And as ugly as that is, maybe that’s the key to getting and staying motivated. just keep thinking of that sweet, sweet money and let my greed drive me to do all those things I currently do not do.

Like editing my work, for instance, and making it as good as I possibly can before sending it out into the world.

And chasing those Upwork jobs and rebuilding my rep as a hard worker who delivers amazing results at lightning speed.

And doing all the other shit I “should” be doing in order to make a life for myself.

Maybe every morning, I should wake up, take a few nice deep breaths, then say “There’s money out there with my name on it!’ and go for it,

I could be that kind of person. The potential is inside me, waiting.

But I am still too damned scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.