Not you the reader, of course. Just life in general.

I don’t think I will make it to FRED tonight. I woke up with lungs that feel super heavy and scratchy inside accompanied by a strung-out, drained feeling that makes it super hard to concentrate and slight, faint tingling and heat in patches all over my body.

Sounds pretty bad. So I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Don’t want to end up with pneumonia again. Dunno how I survived it, psychologically speaking, the first time.

By burying myself deep in crossword puzzles and games on my tablet, I guess. Using those “ignore everything in favour of media consumption” skills I have been honing for all these years.

Yay me. See, I know how to cope!

The problem with not going to FRED is that I will still need to do my usual Sunday night shopping for the week, So now I have to ask Joe to come pick me up after FRED and take me to Pricemart or wherever to get my groceries.

And I hate having to pose. But I have little choice.

My word, do I feel like crap. I feel like my dealing with reality right now is like waiting for the merry go round to come around to the brass ring over and over again, only in this case the brass ring is reality and I can only deal with reality when I am in range.

I hope that makes sense. It seems like it does, but I am kind of out of it, so maybe not.

Right now, the inner narrative of my life goes like this :

I was born in 1973. I was a pretty happy kid up to the rape. I was precociously bright, cute, outgoing (but with a touch of shyness), charming as heck, and quite often the center of attention and maybe even a tad spoiled.

Then I got raped by a stranger at the age of four and it crippled me psychologically.

Fast forward to the first day of school. I go alone. School is scary. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do. And I don’t know anyone because I didn’t get to go to kindergarten.

On the other hand, I already knew how to read at a 4th grade level and I knew math up to but not including the times tables for multiplication.

So I had both an advantage and a disadvantage. I was mentally advanced – far, far ahead of my peers – but socially retarded.

Aaaand that was the pattern for the rest of my life, really.

Still, it wasn’t too bad at first. I got along with my fellow students. I was even somewhat popular, probably due to all my goofy charm and natural wit.

But that made me a target for, ironically, another bright freckle faced redheaded kid, and he turned the tables on me and got everyone calling me fat and generally looking down on me, and so down to the bottom I went.

Not having gone to kindergarten, I lacked the social skills to defend myself.

So school sucked. Bullied, outcast, ostracized, and degraded. At the same time, the actual school part of things was insanely easy for me and I was bored most of the time,

I also didn’t have the social skills to think to show some humility. The schoolwork was laughably easy to me and it showed.

During this time, I occasionally had a group of friends but I was always mistreated and bullied by them as well. I was a wimpy whiny kid and not that fun to have around.

Eventually, I graduated with honors from high school. And then, after one last summer goofing off, I went to university.

There I acquired a good group of friends. Nerds like me, with whom I felt comfortable and relaxed and included. We hung out and played cards at The Pit, a cafeteia, and called ourselves the Pit Crew.

Those were the happiest days of my life. My classes were cool, I had a social life, I hung out with my friends a lot, and things were generally groovy.

We all know how that ended. My parents defunded my education, I was forced to move back home to live with them because their severance packages meant that I did not qualify for a student loan because they could afford to continue to pay for my education.

They just chose not to.

And the worst part is that I cheerfully agreed to all of it. It was all done with my permission. All my life, I had been expected to make life as easy for my parents as possible and so I was still the kid who was eager to please and okay with everything and whose motto was “Sure thing, Mom and Dad.”

How clever of them to take advantage of that.

This withdrawal of funding killed me inside. I went downhill fast. Ended up a dehyrdrated, malnourished, paranoid, hyprochorndriac lunatic with vivid hallucinations (mostly tactile and auditory) who spent all day on the couch in front of the TV while life continued as normal around him. My IBS was out of control, I couldn’t keep food in, even drinking water made me feel sick, and I was wracked with pain.

Eventually, I hit my frustration point and started bringing myself out of that terrible state bit by bit, fighting it with a savage determination.

That got me to a stable state, and that is where I have been ever since. For more than 20 years, I have managed to get by via compulsively playing videos and hanging out online all day. I have done it in Portland, Silicon Valley, the GVRD, and of course, back home in Summerside, and to be honest, it’s pretty much the same everywhere.

At times, I have fought back against my mental illness. Other times it was all I could do to survive. The mental health system here has let me down in many ways over the last 20 years and I only started to actually get better when I happened to ask for individual therapy when there happened to be a therapist open to new patients and therefore I got hooked up with Doctor Costin.

It’s been a long road since then. It took me to Kwantlen and then VFS but it could not save me from my own inner demons when they took advantage of me and coninced me to quit a great job and then not get a new one right away.

And then Skyrim came along, and their victory was complete.

And I still have not really recovered from Skyrim. That hole was mighty deep and I am still not as functional as I was when I fell in for over a year.

And that’s where I am right now. Making it through the day the best I can, clinging to this sad little perch of mine, life not going anywhere, just a long painful slide to the grave.

That’s the story so far. Can’t say it is particularly exciting or moving. But it’s life.

I hope it has a happy ending.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Can’t think of anything to blog about at the moment. Not even something silly and fluffy.

Hmmm. Maybe I will post some of my old vids.

Never mind, apparently there is no way for me to go to the list of my own files, the ones I have uploaded to YouTube, any more. I am completely lost. Why do I keep finding things where the most basic functions are the hardest to find?

These people don’t know crap about interface design.

I can, however, access my playlists, and I have one where I list some of my favorite funny videos of all time.

So let’s try sharing some of THOSE, assuming any of them are still there.

I am feeling so old-guy cranky right now.

Definitely one of my all time fave Internet videos. The music is meh – fun but generic, like most ska, but the animation if superb and does a very good job of tellling its little story of interspecies “love” using only visuals, with a bit of help from the music.

I say “love” because, watching the thing now, I can see it has not aged as well as I might have thought. The message in a modern context is “relentlessly and even violently stalk the one you love with Terminator-like singlemindedness and eventually they will surrender and love you. ”

And there is so much wrong with that.

She gets away with it only because she’s a cute little bunny girl. That’s why it doesn’t necessarily trip the This Is Bad alarm right away. She is cute and harmless looking and that means she can relentlessly hound poor Cat Dude in a way that would obviously be wrong if you changed anything about her.

Like, if you flipped the genders and it was a male bunny relentlessly pursuing a lady cat, The bunny boy would come across as cross between Pepe LePew and Hannibal Lector. The ending would be absolutely horrifying. And nothing about it would be “cute”.

Or change species. If it was a lady cat pursuing a male bunny with all the subtlety of a mid-frenzy pirahna, we would all assume, not unreasonably, that she wants to eat the poor bunny boy.

Or at least do a lot of things to him whether he wants them or not.

The past becomes a foreign country when you are Woke, doesn’t it? The innocent things of our younger days suddenly seem creepy as hell.

Oh well,. Moving on.

Here is the first Bowser and Blue song I ever heard :

I still love the song and find it highly amusing, although of course, to people who did not grow up in the 80’s,it would be nigh on incomprehensible.

Imagine coming across this when you had never even heard the word “Rambo” before and think of Sylvester Stallone as “that guy from the Expendables movies, maybe”. \

At one point, I had an entire slew of their tracks that I had taped off the radio. And it was great stuff, and very hip at the time. It has a song making fun of Aussie mania, for instance. It was sharp stuff, and some of it was quite daring.

There was a song with the nuanced and sensitive title “Captain Hindgrinder” which was a very long series of nautical/homosexuality innuendos, with lines like “Grab hold of this here tiller, boy, heave ho and up she rises!” and “Have you ever been to sea, Billy Boy, Billy Boy/ have you felt the waves a-crashin’ at your door?” and ending with the Captain saying “We’ll make a seaman of you yet, Billy boy. ”

Look, I never said it was highbrow, I just said it was funny. And kinda hot.

But that was way back in the 80’s, when Bowser and Blue were a hip young comedy duo playing chic clubs in Montreal.

Check out the crap those assholes put out now.

Now it’s the kind of comedy that might give Joe Clark a small chuckle and that your parents embarrass you by being WAY too into it.

What else have we got here?

This one is not exactly funny, but a lot of fun anyhow :

To be honest, I had totally forgotten this little gem. I saw something called “Nursery Rhyme” on the list and I wondered what the hell is that?

Turns out to be a very cute and clever little confection, with great performances of some very cunningly arranged rhymes. They manage to deliver the lines in a more or less naturalistic style despite the fact that they were delivering rhyming couplets, and that takes a good deal of skill.

Plus I love how the cast of characters keeps expanding. Gives me a good “amateur production so we want as many people as possible to get a credit” feeling.

And I know I already said this, but it’s just so damned clever!

Plus Tom is pretty hot, in a douche-y kind of way.

I just posted it to my Facebook with this introduction :

A clever confection of humor and verse
About a poor girl whose day gets worse and worse
But never you worry, it all ends quite happily
With melodious couplets that go off quite snappily
And I know that some people mind find it a bit twee
But others will enjoy it – people like me
So enjoy this small tale where things get worse and worse
(Not safe if you hate people speaking in verse.

What can I say, the rhyming’s contagious.
It makes me do things completely outrag-

No. I can stop,. I am stopping now. This is me, stopping.

Phew. That was a close one.

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed the videos as much as I enjoyed sharing them!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Alright, let’s see if I’ve got any goddamned words in me today.

I have been really thinking about turning myself into the most badass alpha left wing pundit ever. The ultimate balls-out, no-apologies, in your face liberal the world has ever seen. The kind of person to send all those right wing pussies running.

I am so sick of all their candy-assed bullshit. Left wing wimpiness has let these subhuman cretins grow and flourish like goddamned roachs and it’s high time someone put the boots to them and remind them what fear of God really looks like.

And unlike most American liberals, I am not afraid to be openly aggressive. I don’t give a fuck what other liberals think of me. In fact, I am pretty sure that if I could pull this off and actually shove my way into the pundit-sphere, a lot of liberals will push back at me because they are scared of my aggressive stance and don’t want to be associated with someone so, well, “not nice”.

Suits me fine. I will take on the whole world if I have to. There will be enough liberals with balls/ovaries who will hear my rallying cry and think “Finally!” and rush to my side to be my New Liberalism Army.

One of my main messages will be that you don’t have to choose between evil and cowardice any more. There is a third option.

Left wing politics meets right wing tactics. I intend to copy every single one of their dirty tricks and tactics, and with perfect fidelity, down to the very last decimal point.

That way I can feed their own evil back to them and make them fucking choke on it. Go ahead, object to my methods. Take on that level of cognitive dissonance as your feeble fucking minds try to maintain faith in people who do exactly what I do while also condemning it in me.

In fact, a major part of my strategy will be to maximize cognitive dissonance in my opponents. I want them to suffer as much as possible for their complicity and moral corruption. I want to drive them to the edge of madness for their crimes.

In essence, I want to make it as painful as possible for them to keep being evil.

And the aggressive stance is part of that. They are used to following the aggressive males on the right. It fits with their reptile brain outlook of the world. Me follow strong man so me feel safe!

But i will be sending out those exact same signals. So now what?

Guess they will just have to learn to THINK FOR THEMSELVES.

I will further confuse them by calling public liberals on their wimpiness and their implicit complicity in the degradation of the body public via their total failure to provide credible opposition to the right wing, letting them grow out of control and put the entire world at risk with Trump just because they are lily livered cowards without sufficient courage of their convictions to be willing to go toe to toe with these fucking degenerates.

So then they will see a fat angry aggressive man attacking liberals (the bad ones), and they are very used to doing what those people say and believing what those people tell them to believe, so how are they suppose to resist following me?

Again, by actually THINKING.

And when they think, we win, even if all they are doing is coming up with counter-arguments. There is a reason education makes people more liberal, and it has nothing to do with some kind of indoctrination regime.

It’s because education teaches people to think.

The fact that this inevitaby leads to them becoming more liberal is, I think, the simplest and most elegant argument for the superiority of liberalism there is.

Because the smarter people get, the more liberal they become.

QED, mother fuckers.

I’ve been pondering a mystical-ish truth lately.

Let’s see if I can get it across. Basically, I have been wondering how it can be that so much of the art that really reaches people deep inside comes from outcast weirdos like me who seem to all the world to barely be connected to the human race at all.

How is this possible? What is this interior realm we can go to where, paradoxically, the further into it we go, the more our art connects with the hearts of millions?

It’s almost like by being such outsider loners, we can go deeper into the zeitgeist than the rest of our fellow homo sapiens. By going away from them consciously, we get closer to them spiritually.

It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.

I suppose there’s also the issue of concentration, though. Because so many of us have trouble expressing ourselves in the usual way, we end up saving up and concentrating our emotions into a form we can express through our art.

I know that’s the case with me. I am socially isolated by my mental illness. I have received almost none of the socialization that might have allowed me to connect with my fellow human beings in a more “normal” way. An argument could be made that I barely have enough contacts with the human race to keep my remaining marbles.

Writing is the only way I have to express my emotions, and my progression as a writer has been entirely based around being able to get more and more emotion into every word I write.

If I wasn’t this socially damaged, I wouldn’t have the impetus to write so much and I probably would not be writing the words you are reading right now.

Yes, these very words!

And as I write, I can feel myself drawing upon something that is not entirely my own. Something that came from me and all my thoughts and observations and intuitions about the human condition and the world it lives in, but that also encompasses a reality outside my individual self.

And in that obscure and lonely place, I connect with my fellow humans.

And I can’t really explain that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, I know Low Blood Sugar Events are very bad. They are the sort of thing that should not happen as they technically put my life in peril and if I ever had one and there was no way to get to food in time, I might just shuffle off this mortal fucking coil.

That said, I have to admit they can be rather exciting.

Kind of like a suspense and/or intrigue movie, where the hero has to get to the bomb in time to defuse it before it blows up Big Ben or whatever.

In my mind, those movies are inherently British.

And yes, I know that is a crazy way of thinking of it. Life threatening health events should not be viewed as fun, for fuck’s sakes. I really should be taking the whole thing a lot more seriously.

Whatevah. I am home now, and eating, and my blood sugar is going back to normal, and so to be, at least for the moment, all is hunky dory in my little world.

This happens every time I go to therapy without eating lunch first. As patient readers know, I find it hard to eat before therapy because I usually have entered a state of anticipation and/or agitation and that tends to suppress my appetite and warn me that eating at that point might activate my “nervous stomach” and unleash IBS hell.

Plus, sometimes I need sleep so bad that I sleep all the way to 12:30 pm, which is when we usually leave for therapy.

That’s what happened today. Doesn’t make ending up in the LBSE state any less stupid – I could have grabbed an apple on the way out or something – but it does at least explain it a little.

Oh, and don’t worry too much about my craziness. I am not so far gone that I would deliberately avoid eating in order to have the “fun” experience of an LBSE.

I mean,. not unless I was really REALLY bored.

I think too god damned much.

And not just in the most obvious way of being someone who neurotically overthinks every situation and ruins things for themselves.

That’s the sitcom version of thinking too much, and it applies to pretty much all us neuroitc intellectual types. I have definitely fallen victim to it myself. It’s a case of trying to screw in a light bulb with a hammer. The intellectual’s brain is reacting to its own agitation by doing its default, which is to attack the problem via ratiobnal problem solving and the application of intellect.

But because the problem is essentially an emotional one, this does not work, and all that ends up happening is that the rational brain’s frustration jacks up the agitation level even more, which makes the brain work even harder to solve it rationally, and before you know it you are freaking the fuck out.

I am lucky in that I recognized this in myself and learned to hit ctrl-C and exit the loop when I realize it’s happening.

Sometimes it is good to have a very strong emotional suppression circuit.

No, my version of thinking too much goes much deeper. I am talking about the same kind of hammer and light bulb issue but calcified into layers upon layers of frozen mentation that serve no purpose whatsoever, they are just the detritus of other times when the mind tried to think its way through an emotional problem and then gave up and put the whole thing on a shelf when that failed to work.

And it;s this detritus that is gumming up the works in my brain and making it so hard for me to think clearly, plan rationally, and sort through my tangled emotions so that I can get shit done for a change.

So what is needed is a targeted solution. Like with an anti-cancer drug, the idea is to create an antigen that destroys these pointless icebergs of frozen reason without (ideally) destroying any healthy active cells.

Call it a Spring Thaw. Only frozen things will be affected. And yes, there will be a flood.

But there are worser fates.

And I know, deep in my heart, that no matter how high the waters rage or how deep my silly little sandcastles get swept away, whatever emerges when the floodwaters recede and life is possible once more will be me. All me.

The real me.

And I think that’s worth getting a bit wet, don’t you?

Hmmm. 250 words left and drawing a total blank on what to write about.

It’s just like what happened at the tail end of today’s therapy session. There was something like ten minutes left in the session and I just kind of….ran out of words.

That does not happen very often. I am almost never at a loss for words. If anything, my problem is that I generate far more words than I could ever express, even if I did nothing but write all day, every day, for a year.

And these unsaid words leave my consciousness but not my mind. They accumulate in the gutters and crevices of my mind and take up space and drain my mental resources. Each deferred word contains a tiny shard of energy from the intention to be said, and having all that energy locked away is really draining to a person.

More pointless icebergs to melt I guess.

Anyho, I ran out of words at the end of the session and ended up ending the session early because I had nothing more to say.

I know why it happened. The sheer amount of emotion stirred up by all the stuff we had talked about was overwhelming me and I needed some non-speaking time in order to process and sort through it all.

And I find that encouraging. Clearly, I was accessing some really deep stuff, enough to create a rare mental state. I want to do more stuff like that.

Whatever metamorpheses I need to go through in order to heal will not be pleasant, easy, or fun. I accept that now.

I am ready to surrender this form, this shape in order to be created anew.

Who knows what form I will take? Certainly not I. But I do know one thing :

Whatever form I take, I will still be me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t feel like doing anything serious, so tonight, I will get chatty.

This mostly going to be music, but we will start off with a YouTube series.

Let me introduce you to my new Internet boyfriendu :

How do I love you? Let me count the ways. You are sharp, cute, funny, nerdy, crazy about science, upbeat, fun to be around, and are really rocking the blond hair black beard thing like you are a travel sized Thor.

Oh, and the show is ten tons of fun too, of course. It’s like it was made for me. The high energy level, the quick pace, the combination of science and silliness, the taking of pop[ culture questions to ludicrous extremes, it has everything but Adam Savage.

And Jamie Hyneman, I suppose, but meh. Slap a beret on a walrus and call it a day.

And like I have already over-established, I love the host. He is so funny and cute! And he gets overexcited by science just like I do!

In fact, I am a tiny bit mad at him and the show because they are a little too much like an idea I had for a video series called “Fruvous Gets Way Too Excited About Science”, in which I would do my best to share how excited I get over science news some time.

It’s not exactly the same, obviously. Mine would be a science news show where I try to convey just why exciting science news is so goddamned exciting.

Come to think of it, that would dovetail neatly with another idea of mine, which is to do my own “science sermons”, so to speak. Inspirational speeches about how amazing the world (heck, the universe) is when you can see it from the point of view of science.

Like Carl Sagan’s and Neil Degrasse Tyson’s magical words about how we are a mote of dust in a sunbeam, a pale blue dot on Pluto’s horizon, and yet also the most complex and intricate things in the universe at the very same time.

Science is such a trip, man!

I could totally be a science educator like my crush up there. I have endless love and enthusiasm for science, I know enough about it to get the idea across to others, I am highly charismatic and articulate, and it would be work I would absolutely love.

Oh, and many times in my life, I have explained something to someone so well that they ask, “Wow, why hasn’t anyone else explained it to me this way?”

Because I am fucking magical, darling. I only make it SEEM simple and easy.

Some people talk about science replacing religion. I understand why they want that. It’s certainly the closest thing I have to a religion myself, and I bet I am not alone in that.

But science can only replace a few of the functions of science. It can provide a cosmology, of course, one with sweep and grandeur and an unparalelled ability to see yourself as one tiny part of an enormous cosmic thing.

Yet it is very bad at anything involving warmth and comfort. Its strict adherence to absolute objective reality means it cannot offer comfort to people when times are tough, it can’t be there with them when they are lonely and scared in the middle of the night, it can’t hold their hand when they feel like their world is coming apart, and it can’t provide satisfying answers to the questions people have burning in their hearts.

In short, it cannot provide people the emotional inputs they desperately need in order to keep their minds and their moods balanced. Religion can.

Take it from someone who has never had religion at all and has spent a lot of time thinking about what it does for people who have it. I can see what I am missing due to my atheistic upbringing. I know, inimately, that logic, reasons, and science only go so far and that beyond that point, you are going to need something beyond reason and the conscious mind in order to make it through the world.

I’m working on it.

In fact, I am increasingly sure that all the most important things that religion can give a person are given when they are very young. Religion gives people a fundamental sense of security and safety that can last a lifetime, and can even survive a total rejection of the original faith and everything it stands for.

Because the dogma doesn’t matter, the corruption of the faith doesn’t matter, the outright absurdity of the beliefs doesn’t matter, none of that matters. All of that comes after the patient has received their inoculation.

I can’t prove this, obviously. I couldn’t prove it if I fMRIs of every brain in the world. But nevertheless, I think it is true.

And it would neatly explain the phenomenon I have observed where even the most virulent of atheists retains enough of a faith in God to stay angry at Him.

Logically speaking, if you don’t believe in the existence of God, then there is nobody to get mad at. At least, that’s how it seems to an outsider to religion like me.

I have no anger at God or Allah or Whoever or their churches or their minions or their holy books or any of all that for the same reason I am not mad at Sherlock Holmes or Captain Nemo or Mister Tumnus the Faun from the Narnia books.

Because I never thought they were real in the first place.

But for those who had then lost religion, my kind of thinking makes no sense. Or rather, it makes perfect sense but it completely fails to track with them emotionally.

And that is because no matter how their conscious mind rejects the faith, that deep down core of belief never dies.

It just hides.

And I wish I had one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

With spring comes sleep apnea, it seems.

It’s one of those sickening things where I didn’t really realize how nice it was that something was gone until it came back.

So like yesterday, I feel all messed up in the usual ways. I did some of my breathing exercises and that got me out of the worst of it – as in, I don’t feel like I am dying any more and I can think basic thoughts without pain.

But I still feel pretty burnt around the edges.

Still processing my recent revelations about my life being my own and there being no reason to feel like I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing because there isn’t anything I am supposed to be doing except deal with my illness the best I can.

As a result, I twitch-switch between three modes at random :

1. Forgetful. Easy to fall back into old thought patterns, especially when bad sleep is compromising my mind. But I don’t worry about relapsing. I will continue to yank myself off that negative path and back onto the healthy one no matter how many times I have to do it in order to convince my brain that it would be easier to simply accept the new path as permanent.
2. Hopeful. AKA The Good One. In this mode, I feel free and relaxed. I can accept myself, more or less. It’s a state that is as new and wobbly and fragile as a just-born calf, but it will get stronger with time. Especially if I feed it well.
3. Terrified. That old familiar existential terror. A change this deep always comes with a feeling like a huge scary void just opened up in front of me and I am clinging precariously on the lip of a deep crater and trying to figure out how the hell I am going to cross it. But I know time is on my side and I can figure it out as I go and nothing bad will really happen. The crater is an illusion generated by my fears and I don’t have to follow its bullshit rules if I don’t want to.

As I work thorugh my issues via therapy and blogging, things will solidify, I am sure. The important thing is that I cling hard to the truth oif my freedom and not let my depression pull its usual distract and destroy bullshit it uses to protect itself.

This is my new shape, god damn it, and it is here to stay. It is whatever wants to change that which will bend. And I will not go back to bad habits of thought simply because it’s easier. Fuck easier.

So right now, all my spare energies are dedicated to hanging on to the new reality. Eventually, the fear will subside and I will be able to climb down from my precarious perch and cross the valley and climb to a brand new height.

But right now, I have to get some more fucking sleep.

One of the greatest advantages of age is forethought.

That’s why old age and treachery can always beat youth and vigor. What good are youth and vigor against an opponent who can see more of the chess board at once than you, and is therefore far better at predicting and manipulating outcomes?

I first noticed this phenomenon in myself when I was in my late 30’s. I noticed it after having an illuminating yet frustrating conversation with a furry friend who was in their early 20’s who was complaining about life problems that, to me, were clearly the outcomes of his own behaviour but to him were mysteries.

I did not, I am glad to say, give in to the urge to say something unhelpful like “well what did you expect to happen when you did A” or “you do B. That’s why you keep ending up in the same place. If you want to stop ending up in the same place, stop doing B. ”

I am not usually that blunt. It’s not always easy, because there is always a side of me that wants to hit people right between the eyes and to hell with their fragile emotions.

And if you are that kind of person, you can even staple a halo onto it by telling yourself you are “just being honest” and that you are just too “real” for some people who “can’t handle the truth” and are therefore weak and unworthy, unlike your rugged ass.

Luckily, I am not that kind of person. The most important thing to me is to help. I have a very strong urge to help people and make things better for them, and blasting them with the hard cold truth does not usually help.

Sometimes it does. Sometimes people need the short sharp shock of radical bluntness to snap them out of whatever foul illusion is plaguing them.

But I am not such a fool that I would think that justifies being totally blunt all the time. I am, after all. a pragmatist, and that means, among other things, that I consider myself to be responsible for all reasonably predictably consequences of my actions, and there is no room in this ethic for doing things I know will hurt people.

In its own way, it’s a very severe and austere morality. To a fault, probably. I might be better off with something that did allow for a certain amount of venting my emotions on others or some other special category of acceptable victims.

But that’s just not who I am. I am what I believe, and that means I have to live what I believe to the greatest extent possible.

Add in my empathy, and you can see why I live and die by results. I will know whether my words make someone happy or sad. In fact, I will experience that happiness or sadness myself. So that is always my bottom line.

Ergo I cannot do other than what I truly believe to be best for all involved. What I think will increase the amount of happiness in the world.

That runs so strong in me that it doesn’t even feel like a choice.

It’s just who I am. I am what I believe.

And there is no room in my heart or my soul for anything else.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Remember how I have been talking about freeing myself from the feeling that I am never doing what I am supposed to be doing and how that feeling is like the bedrock layer of my depression?

Well as I was making supper, the penny finally dropped. The other half of the equation suddenly flashed into my mind, and lo, I was Illuminated.

I realized that if there is nothing I am supposed to be doing, then there is nothing wrong with my playing video games all day.

And that….. is huge. So huge that I have no idea how to deal with it yet. It feels like I just opened the door to a whole new world and I am staring through said door trying to summon the nerve to go through it.

It made me realize that I have been hating myself for “wasting” my time on Earth for a very long time. It came part and parcel with my feeling that I am never doing what I am supposed to be doing. They are two sides of the same coin.

Conjoined twins joined at the hate.

So that’s it for that bullshit. I hereby declare that it is perfectly fine for me to play video games all the time. That is perfectly acceptable behaviour. What matters is my happiness, and if video games make me happy, there is no more to be said.

And they do.

Could I be happier if I were more actualized? Maybe. And maybe not. At any point, I am free to choose to pursue something more productive.

But I don’t have to. And I am definitely not supposed to. There is nothing to duck or dodge because there are no obligations to others or even to myself.

I don’t even have to contemplate all my options if I don’t feel up to it. I know that I can never truly contemplate them all anyway. The best that I can hope for is to ponder a few possibilities and choose the one that appeals to me the most or, at the very least, seems to suck the least.

And if it doesn’t work out, whatever. I know there are a zillion other options, so if I go through a bunch of possibilities before I find the one that is the right fit for me. it is no big deal. There is not a lot at risk.

So I can just relax and have fun for once. And lead a natural, healthy life without constantly being hounded my demons into hiding from the world by whatever means I have at my disposal.

My life is truly my own, to do with as I please. All that matters is my happiness, and to hell with thoughts of my potential or my obligation to make something of myself or any of the rest of that toxic bullshit that has been calling the shots from behind the scenes for way, way too long.

I am me and I am mine and nobody else’s needs come before mine by default. I am a fully legitimate and worthy adult and I deserve as big a share of the good things in life as everybody else gets.

I am under no geas to always mimize myself and my impact on the world and I am especially not under any obligation to minimize how much resources I use, whether that resource is time, money, space, or anything else.

I have been cringing in the shadows like a timid mouse for far too long. It’s high time I sit down at the big kids’ table and demand my share of the meal.

I deserve better. I deserve better. I deserve better.

Repeat until believed.

Here’s a big one : my disability doesn’t make me inferior to others. I have felt a great deal of shame for the fact that I have never supported myself for a long long time and it is time for it to go.

Because you know what? I’ve been sick. And nobody expects sick people to support themselves. All they expect us to do is do our best to get better.

And that’s what I have been doing for a longass time.

When my parents took me out of university and I was forced to move back into the family home in Summerside, it dealt my mental health a near-fatal blow. That’s why I went seriously fucking crazy there for a while.

And true, I managed to haul myself out of that quagmire by sheer force of will backed by a certain degree of good old fashioned cussedness. But I came nowhere near to recovering fully. I only managed to shift to a less drastic form of crazy.

And since then, I have been very ill. I have managed as best as I could, considering for a lot of that time I didn’t even know I was ill. Once I had my diagnosis, I made the best use of the resources available to me in order to get better, but the system eventually gave up on me before I was healed and I was too sick and too poor to go in search of private therapy on my own.

So I went another long time medicated but untreated. It was sheer luck that I happened to ask my GP about private therapy when Doctor Costin happened to be available.

Five years later, and I am finally well enough to realize these things.

Oh, and finally : it is not my fault that it is taking me so long to heal. I have consistently done the best I could to get better but the system let me down and left me in a position where I was too sick to demand the medicine I needed.

Even now, I can only push against the current every now and then. The rest of the time I just get through the day however I can.

And that’s fine. I am doing all I can and that’s all anyone can ask of me.

It is not my fault that the system has repeatedly failed me and it is not my fault that the world, in general, does not know how to handle people like me.

After all, I am one of a kind. There are no other people like me.

And that’s fine too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Blogging while impaired today.

Not by alcohol or drugs or anything fun like that. Just bad sleep, like usual. I am in that fun mode where I am dizzy, disoriented, achey, breaky, hearty, and unable to resist the urge to make dumb jokes about annoying songs from the 90’s.

My mind is floating in a treacle-thick clinging fog and it feels like my eyes have two different and incompatible ideas as to where they wanna focus. Tastes like something died in my mouth and I am pretty sure it didn’t die of natural causes.

More like something gruesome and lingering. With “black” in the name.

So the words, they do not come easy at the moment. But I, of course, will soldier on. After all, I owe it to you, my reading public, who no doubt await each each daily missive with the breathless anticipation of a child on Xmas Eve, or a bride awaiting her first night with her husband and hoping he remembered to read that article about anal.

Plus, honestly, I am too mentally fried to do much else. I certainly couldn’t get very far in any of my video games.

Hell, right now I wouldn’t even be abe to follow the plot in a game of Pong.

I wonder why they didn’t call it Ping?

Even though I just cashed my cheque on Thursday, I continue to stress out about money because my expenses have magically outgrown my budget.

Don’t they always? Income rarely idles.

So I have been wracking my brains for ways to economize. Luckily, said brain happens to be really good at that kind of optimization,

And it can’t come too soon because I am so tired of worrying about money. It raises my background stress level and thus drains my mood and makes it hard for me to ever truly relax because it makes me feel paranoid and defensive and restless.

Damn I need to go back on UpWork and get some paying work. It would do wonders for my mood on so many levels.

Oh, but that might cut into my oh so precious video game time. Try as I might, I can’t entirely stop imagining my life as a video game time optimization exercise.

That’s what addiction is like, I suppose. Without video games to fill all available time gaps, I would have to face that infinite corridor of infinite doors and actually figure out what the hell to do with myself.

Much easier to keep that eletronic tit in my mouth and hide from time and life in a world where I feel safe because it doesn’t matter and isn’t real.

Not better. Just easier.

And now, here I am back trying to figure out how to improve my lot in life without ending up in the jaws of my self-hatred.

In order to change things, I have to be aware of what is wrong, and that means self-examination and introspection.

But that is just the kind of opening my malicious superego adores. Once my laser-like mind is set to seek problems, it is easier than anything for that to turn into a fault finding mission with the inevitable result that instead of positive change, it just leads to my hating myself and giving up.

And yet, if I do nothing, nothing happens, and I just keep floating down this long and lonely canal towards an ignoble and senseless death.

Perhaps the happy medium is to simply concentrate on buidling my strength and my health and my happiness, and forget all about plans and goals and such. Take the energy of that restless desire to be going somewhere in life and use it to reinforce my mood and my mental health.

I definitely feel like there is a stronger, healthier. happier version of me lost in the mists of my poor mental health somewhere. That version of me knows how to channel my natural wellspring of enthusiasm into positive action and a positive mood instead of having it all twisted up and impacted inside me and causing me pain.

That part of me got crushed by life but it is still there. The happy little redheaded kid who was cute and charming as heck and loved by all didn’t die when I was raped at 4, it just went away for a long time, and it is within my power to bring it back.

That is, indeed, my goal. Not a regression, just a return to a purer, stronger, cleaner mental state from before one random pervert wrecked my life forever.

That ended up in a darker place than I intended.

Enthusiasm is definitely a big part of the solution, as well as its fraternal twin, inspiration. I think my natural, healthy mode is to let my big waves of emotion carry me forward instead of suppressing them harshly and having all that energy crash against the seawalls in my mind, doing a lot more harm than good.

That would involve way less worrying about where things are going, methinks. And getting over the need to know where the road leads before setting foot on it. And that,l in turn, would require a lowering of my usual state of eye-bulding freaked out paranoia into something a little more reasonable and trusting.

After all, I know that my fears are mostly irrational and that for the most part. that hidden hypervigilence costs far, far, far too much to justify its occasional successes.

I just want to pick up that poor scared little animal inside me and cuddle it, stroke its fur, rub its ears, and tell it everything is going to be okay now because now I am here for it and I will keep all the bad things away and it can relax because it is safe.

That poor little critter has been running for a very long time, and it is so tired and so scared but also too scared to stop because that’s when the monsters will GET it.

Not any more, little critter. I will keep you safe and warm and dry and no monsters will ever be able to get at you again.

I love you so much, little one, and know this : you will be safe in my arms forever and ever and ever.

Because I’m here now, and everything is going to be OK.

Now let’s go home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Finally, there are the games I disliked so much I immediately uninstalled them.

Although in the case of this first one, it’s not really the game’s fault.

I hereby present : Tooth and Tail.

The caption expresses my first issue with the game, which is entirely personal and does not bear on the enjoyment of anyone without my particularly sensitive temperament : the furry animals are killing each other.

And with a downright lustful brutality too, and an amoral zeal I find highly disturbing. I am the guy who refuses to watch Watership Down because he heard bunnies die in it and I just can’t handle that.

The fact that roadkill is a thing that could keep me awake nights if I let it.

Make love not war, fuzzies!

But I was prepared to give it a shot anyhow. So I booted it up and started a game, and then my second issue popped up because it does not work like other RTS games I have played and I am simply not in the mindset to absorb a bunch of new rules for a game with which I already have emotional issues in a genre I don’t like anyhow.

So mostly, it’s because I am too damned old to learn new things rapidly any more;. It’s the same thing that happened in what turned out to be the Linguistics Class From Hell.

So between oldness, squeamishness, and not liking RTS games, this game never really stood a chance with me.

Ergo, I am not going to give this one a rating. I barely played enough of it to have an opinion let alone an actually qualified and coherent one. All I can do is relate my experience and hope you, gentle reader, can get something useful from it.

So my review is basically “not the game for me.” Moving on.

Then there is this monstrous oddity :

I wish I had watched that trailer before I bothered trying to play the goddamned thing.

As is, I have to admit that knowing it was made specifically to hurt a certain kind of person (my guess : he wanted to hurt mastery-oriented fanatically persistent “must conquer” types) makes the game make a lot more sense.

Not the naked dude in a kettle thing. That remains something best left between Bennet Fodder and whatever fetish message board he hangs out on.

But I can grasp the sort of pent up bitterness that would lead someone to design something specifically designed to hurt the kind of person who tends to get ahead in life because they happen to have the sort of temperament that works in this world.

In fact, the whole game seems like something I would invent…. in my mind. But unlike Bennett Fodder, I would never actually make it because the sane part of my mind would remind me that the people it would hurt are innocent people who have done me no wrong and have comitted no crime so there is no justification for hurting them.

So while I “get it”, Bennett, I don’t approve.

Ergo this game gets a 2/10 for me. It sucks. It was meant to suck. It fulfilled its mission of being a game that punishes you for playing it, ergo – do not play it.

It would have been 1/10, but I have to grudgingly admit it’s a clever idea.

But seriously. Even if you get it for free. Don’t play it.

It can only lead to pain. And the whole time the game will be laughing at you for being stupid enough to keep playing.

Don’t play it. Moving on.

And that’s it for the whole bundle. Mission accomplished.

I know that my reviews are not exactly professional quality. I go on and on about my own personal experiences with the games and nobody wants to read that in a game review, or anywhere else for that matter.

Still, it was an enjoyable exercise and I think that if I can keep at it,. I will internalize what is and is not worth including, and thus free my writing skills (which are awesome) from my need to express my innermost thoughts (which is far less commercially viable).

Although I dunno. Maybe if I was blogging on one of the platforms like Tumblr and did the groundwork of commenting on other people’s blogs, I might attract some kind of following. The kids these days seem to really go for intensely personal, confessional type writing, and I can certainly do that.

The fact that I have done all this blogging – millions of words of it – on a private platform that doesn’t even link to other people’s blogs and is thereore my own little fully controllable ‘world’ is very, very… me.

It’s tragic how often those of us capable of great art are saddled with serious social and psychological issues that keep us from drawing attention to it.

That’s what agents are for, I suppose, but in order to get one, you have to put enough of your work out there so it can be published and therefore prove you do not entirely suck, and of course, if I could do that, I wouldn’t need the agent, would I?

I am such an odd bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, part of me truly thinks I am an amazing author with a lot of things worth saying to say and a lot of stories worth telling to tell, and that if I could connect with an audience, I could make a lot of people happy with my words, and that is fundamentally what I really want to do.

Would be nice if that also paid at least as much as welfare, but it’s not strictly necessary. I could be quite happy as someone with a dedicated group of fans he writes for every day and engages with on a regular basis.

At least for a while. Eventually I would get ambitious and restless.

But it could be very, very nice for a while.

But that auin’t ever going to happen if I hide away in my private little world hear. .

Has anyone seen the exit lately?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We shall start off with another game review while I attempt to boot up my brain.

This next game is very strange. And not just because of the mangled English in the title. Ladies and Gentle Men, I give you….Among the Sleep.

Yup. In this game, you play a two year old toddler. Exactly two years old, seeing as the game starts on your birthday. Everything is idyllic (in a creepy, adult-baby kind of way) at first but then you wake up in the middle of the night and something is very wrong.

It’s extremely original and a very bold experiment. I have to give it major props for that. And the gameplay is original too, because it all revolves around solving the sorts of problems a toddler faces getting around in a world made for larger folk.

And the game has a very creepy atmosphere that reflects just how scary the world can be at that age.

Unfortunately,. that is about all it has. The puzzles are somewhat interesting but not a hell of a lot happens in the game. The spooky atmosphere is great for a while, but you wouldn’t make a movie where all there is the main character does mundane things while spooky music plays, and that is more or less what this game is.

Like I said, the puzzles are somewhat interesting, but not enough to carry a whole game. This game trades very heavily on its originality and originality wears off.

So for me, this game starts strong but doesn’t last long. If the game had more of a plot, that might keep me playing, but it doesn’t. The increasingly surreal locations don’t make me want to play either.

So I am afraid this game only gets a 6/10 from me. It’s a great effort and I applaud its originality and design, but the game feels tragically incomplete.

Now if you will excuse me, for some reason I am super sleepy now and need a nap.

I have a similar problem with out next game, Dream Daddy, a gay dating sim and the first dating sim I have ever played.

And maybe I am just not cut out for the dating sim genre, because while the game is very well made and the writing is genuinely warm and funny in a mainstream sitcom kind of way, most of the game time is spent just paging through enormous chunks of text dialogue and, once more, thhat’s just not enough for me.

I just realized how these reviews are making me sound like I am some kind of twitched out speed freak of a gamer. Oh well.

Somehow, I always assumed dating sims would have more to do in your quest for romance. Like more actively trying to make the love connection. But in this game, I felt very passive and trapped.

It could be that I have not made it out of the game’s VERY LONG intro yet, in which case I am doing it a disservice.

But as it stands, this game gets a 6/10 from me as well.

Random thought : it makes no sense for anyone to change their last name when they get married any more.

I mean, it made sense when women were considered property. Having the woman change her last name to that of his husband made it clear that ownership had transferred from father to husband and said to the world who owned her now and therefore whose property you would be damaging if you interfered with her.

History is so fucking disgusting sometimes.

But in this day and age, it makes no sense for anyone to change anything. I mean, when you think about it, your last name is the most clear and direct thing that you share with the rest of your immediate family. It is your link to them. You grew up in the (Your Last Name) household as part of the (Your Last Name) family. It represents a very big piece of who you are.

To ask anyone to give that up is, to me, asking far too much of them. I am not saying people should not do it. They should do whatever it is that makes them happy. Traditional name change, hypenated names, some strange portmanteau, both changing your last name to SeriouslyFuckMyParents, whatever it is that makes you feel well and truly married, go for it.

But I don’t think anyone has the right to demand it, or even ask for it. You can have the discussion, of course. But nobody should be made to feel like they have to do it.

Like I said, that is asking far too much of someone. It is like asking them to cut out their heart to prove they love you.

And that is my social commentary of the moment.

And now, the subject you’ve all been waiting for : my bowels.

I have felt some disturbing ripples in “The Force”, shall we say. Right now I feel like I am dodging a major IBS attack and I am well aware that I can only dodge it for so long before it catches up with me and I have to deal with it.

Big deal.; So I might spend some highly unpleasant and painful minutes on the ol’ porcelain throne. Been there before, and while it’s very bad, it is usually not very long in the grand scheme of things and afterwards I feel much better.

My first clear sign of trouble happened yesterday. I got up to get ready to go to therapy and my lower intenstines told me, in no uncertain terms, that Something Was Very Wrong Down There and I had better mount the throne ASAP.

What then emerged was alarmingly wet, and came out alarmingly fast.

Since then, I have had small attacks that I beat back via a combination of self-treatment, calming myself, and sheer force of will.

But that probably only bought me some time. Sooner or later, The Big One is coming, and I will just have to weather the storm.

Watch out for them tidal waves!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.