Time to review some of the other games from the Humble Bundle.

Starting with The Last Tree.

A game where you play as a fox exploring a quite gorgeously rendered forest? COlor me intrigued. And the game has everything you see in that trailer.

But not much else. Fundamentally, it suffers from the same trouble as a lot of art games, namely that while it is quite marvelous as art, it’s not so hot as a game.

There is a lot of just running through the forest finding collecting stars. When you get enough stars, another segment of other story, which is entirely done in voiceover, is unlocked. Along the way, there are a lot of small platforming type puzzles to solve.

But for me that is just not enough. I am a jaded veteran gamer and I need a lot more happening or a lot more to DO than that. There is just not enough THERE for me. So ultimately, this is not the game for me.

However, it’s too well made a game for me to dismiss entirely. For someone looking for a calm, non-violent, peaceful game with beautiful visuals and a slow. intimate, dreamy story to tell, this game would be perfect.

On the strength of that, I give it a 7/10.

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I talked about my whole revelation about the feeling that I am never doing what I am supposed to be doing in therapy today.

This was a deliberate act because I wanted to make sure it stayed in my mind this time and one of the best ways for me to do that is to tell someone else. Then it’s not just thoughts in my head any more. I’ve externalized it. It’s out there.

And my therapist and I discussed the obvious next question : if I rid myself of the terrible burden of this oppressive feeling of never doing what I am supposed to be doing (whatever that is), what on Earth do I do with myself?

It’s the whole infinite hallway with infinite doors problem all over again. My creative intellect can envisage far more possibilities than my depressive’s lack of executive function can possibly process and prioritize.

And yet, I feel like that’s part of depression’s shit show too. I think my mind generates all these possibilities specifically to overwhelm me and thus keep me from taking any action that would threaten the depression’s power over me.

Man the words are not coming easy tonight. I need sleep.

Anyhow, via talking it out with my therapist, I realized that the whole question of what do I do now is wrong. It’s just a slightly diguised version of what I “should” be doing and that shit has got to go.

Even the question of what I really want to do has to go. That just turns the whole thing into a test, and that’s the last thing I need. I want to let go of the entire notion of there being a “right” answer entirely and learn not to complicate my life with big questions and the search for their answers except for strictly recreational purposes.

The world, after all, is hardly weighing on my shoulders.

Which brings me to another thing that came up today : that dreaded word “potential”. I was told I had a lot of it as a kid, and it’s not hard to see why. Here I was, this incredibly bright kid who got amazing grades without even trying very hard. It was entirely appropriate for adults to imagine I would go on to do great things.

But I think that, somewhere along the way, the negative alchemy of depression turned that hopeful message into a terrible sense of obligation and expectation.

Clearly. just going on to lead a mundane middle class life would not be good enough for me. I would be letting everyone down if that happened. At the very least, I had to do something fairly spectacular with my life. Something big and impressive and important.

And I have enough intellectual self-confidence to believe that I am perfectly capable of doing something like that given the right chance. And I know that when it comes to creative works, my ambition knows no bounds and whatever I make will have my own unique kind of strength and power behind it.

And ev3en if that were not true, I have dreamed big for my whole life and I don’t think I could stop now even if I wanted to. Even if I decided for sure that I would be far better off lowering my expectations to something more reasonable.

I know I have greatness within me. I know I could be something truly amazing and unique some day. And that’s not something that am capable of denying. The greatness in me cries out for release. It wants to spread its wings and fly, fly, fly. Fly so high into the clear blue skies that all can see it shine, and be warmed by its glow.

And I wouldn’t kill that even if I could. It might seem like an unnecessary burden now, but just you wait. SOme day, god willin’ and the crick don’t rise, it will be that light that guides me to where I need to be.

I just need to free it of its outdated burdens first. It has the wings to fly but not when it is weighed down by psychological scar tissue, a smotheringly oppressive overactive superego, and old emotional tapes that aren’t even relevant any more.

And that takes time. I think a lot of my sense that there is something I should be doing comes from how badly I want to be doing something purposeful and rewarding.

It’s my frustrated energies that make life so hard for me, and it’s up to me to clear away all the things holding those energies back so I can finally put them to work.

But even that will be allowed to proceed at its own pace.

Because pressure ruins everything.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A very nice friend of mine bought me a game bundle (which I would link to but it’s no there any more) and I have now tried them all.

So I figure it’s review time!

We will start with the game that got me all excited to get the bundle in the first place (and inspired my awesome friend to buy it for me) : Overgrowth.

Those who know me well can see why this went from zero to I MUST HAVE THIS in like zero time for me.

1. It is ninja(ish). I love all things ninja. Ninja ninja ninja. Any game where I can ninja around doing ninja things already has me half sold.
2. It is furry. I love all things furry. Furry furry furry! Every character in the game is an anthro fur of some kind. And they aren’t just normal humans in furry costimes. Their species is a big part of who they are and plays a big role in the story. So honestly, the only way it could be more furry would be if it was set in Zootopia. Or if everyone was naked, I suppose. (There is no nude patch. I checked. )
3. It is brutal, dark, and bloody. And I really crave that in my games. Not to the point of it being mandatory or anything. There are plenty of bright and shiny G-rated games I still enjoy. But being filled with brutal bloody violence against truly evil people scores big marks in my books. That’s part of why I love games like the Witcher series, the Dishonored series, and the Darksiders series.
4. You have amazingly badass and deadly moves. Also big in my book. Plus the art style is amazing.

So how does the real thing stack up? Very good but fairly flawed.

For one thing, the main game is super hard. You will die a LOT. It reminds me of the Ninja Gaiden games for the Xbox in that respect. Luckily, the game checkpoint saves quite frequently, which saves you from having to do the entire level over again each time the game brutally slays you.

And I can live with that. I don’t mind dying a lot doing thing A if I can try again almost instantly. But it is not for the casual gamer.

This is gaming without guardrails. There is absolutely nothing keeping you from killing yourself stupidly or getting in over your head. Nor is it a game where you have a big fat health bar and plenty of healing lying around.

In fact, one striking thing about the game is that it is utterly and mercilessly minimalist. No health bar, no items (except weapons), no traditional saves, no magic, and no frills. This is all about the kung fu fighting, with nothign extraneous to slow you down or distract you from the action.

The controls are a tad nonstandard, and also quite minimalist. To attack continuously, you just hold down the left mouse button. That lets you concentrate on pivoting to face enemies without having to button mash at the same time.

This can result in action exactly like a martial arts movie, where the hero handles being surrounded by enemies by whirling and striking them unpredictably.

Overall, it’s a good game but it could use some work. There is a fine line between “minimalist” and “crude” and this game straddles it. Combine that with its utter lack of marcy for the gamer and I have to say that this is definitely not for everybody.

I give it 7 out of 10. Could have been 8 or even 9 with more development and a slightly more forgiving and friendly nature.

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Another game I got from the bundle is Tangledeep.

It is a “roguelike” game (remember those?), which means the whole idea is to create your character and go exploring a dungeon full of monsters, traps, treasure, and other fun stuff. There is no real plot, just exploration and battle and building up your character via the usual routes of leveling up, getting new skills, and getting better gear.

It’s a heck of a lot of fun. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I do because I figured, big deal, it’s another mindless dungeon crawler.

And technically, it is, but it’s one that is very richly detailed, charmingly depicted, well thought out, and surprisingly deep. There are always a ton of things to do and the game keeps deploying new things at strategic moments and that goes a long long way to keep it from becoming a mindless grind.

So does the fact that it has around 20 character classes to try, each with their own unique set of abilities.

Warning though : there is permadeth. And there is no way to save the game except as part of quitting it. So if you die, that’s it.

This can be turned off. But it’s more fun with it on!

And so, in short, I am totally hooked. The game is a blast. I am so far finding it to be endlessly playable and loads of fun, and for an old phart like me, a little nostagic.

I remember how much fun the original roguelikes could be. Sure, the graphics were beyond primitive, consisting entirelty of the symbols you see on your keyboard, but this simplicity let the programmers imaginations run wild in other ways and so those tgames were some of the most surprising, inventive, engrossing, and creative games I have every played and I have been playing games my entire life.

So I totally recommend Tangledeep. 9 out of ten, baby. If you absolutely need high rez 3D environments with tons going on visually and 4K textures in order to be happy, this game ain’t for you.

But if you remember roguelikes or are just a JRPG fan, get this game!

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Well that’s two of them. There’s like five more.

I will get to them soon, I promise. Meanwhile….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got the sex stuff out of my system for now, so on with the pontification!

The problem of corruption, unsurprisingly, has always been one of power. Nature abhors a power differential, especially a large one, and so the problem has always been one of enabling the low-powered gatekeepers to resist the power of the people the gate is supposed to keep out.

Like the literal gatekeepers of the Great Wall of China. The Chinese empire of the day spent enormous amounts of money to build this enormous Wall, and that left very little left to pay the thousands of people needed to guard the hundreds of gates in the thing.

Because people and goods still have to get through, ya know.

Ergo, you had the Empire being protected by half-starved, untrained people out in the middle of nowhere. All the barbarian hordes that the Wall was expressly built to keep ou of China had to do was offer the gatekeepers what I imagine were some quite hilariously (to the barbarians) paltry bribes and maybe a pat on the back and the gatekeepers would throw open the gates and let them through.

What’s more, because the Empire and its people had this childlike faith in the impenetrability of the Wall, they were completely unprepared when the barbarians attacked their undefended asses, and were utterly decimated.

A similar thing happened in WWII in France with the Maginot Line.

And that is always the problem. Call it the Gatekeeper Dilemma. In a modern context, you see bureaucrats who get paid $75k a year in charge of who gets contracts worth billions of dollars. That kind of money creates an enormous pressure on the individual bureaucrats and as far as I can tell, there is only one way to resist it, and that’s to be the exact kind of mindless, robotic, humorless bureaucrat who sees their job as implementing policy and that’s it that are so often the villains in popular media.

So in that sense, the purity of government rests entirely on the dullness of its bureaucrats. They have to be the sort of people who don’t think outside the box and don’t take personal issues into account and so forth in order to hold together the system’s only defense against the corrupting power of money and politics.

That’s why you hear about countries with rampant corruption where the only way to get anything done is to bribe people. These countries lack the kind of system that rewards their bureaucrats, both governmental and private, for being the boring kind of person that society demands.

In fact, in some places, they may not even have that kind of person. Cultures that are very emotionally open and socially broad may not produce enough of the very type of pressure-proof bureaucratic androids you need in order to keep the corruption out.

This may be a factor in the historical dominance of white European cultures over other, seemingly more emotionally robust cultures of, for instance, the Mediterranean. It takes a certain kind of emotionally repressive culture to even produce the sort of people for whom nothing is more important than faithfully executing their duties.

Those are the kind of people who can resist the charmismatic agents of wealth and power when they show up and give the bureaucrats a taste of a life of wealth and privilege and then offer to let the into the club if they only do what the rich people want them to do.

When there is a lot of money at stake, the rich can always come up with enough money to overwhelm most average people.

And sadly, money is not the only problem. It’s merely the easiest form of power to transfer and track. In truth, any kind of power corrupts. The USSR had a virtually worthless currency and yet the corruption came in just the same because there were people who had the ability to punish or reward people and that is all it took for their to be party leaders living in Western luxury while their people starved.

To a certain extent. rules and regulations can aid the bureaucrats in their fight to resist the temptations of the rich and powerful. When that bureaucrat can say “I can’t help you, my hands are tied” and mean it, that’s a good first step.

Peer pressure also helps. If the bureaucratic culture creates the feeling that the absolute worst thing that could happen would be for a bureaucrat to be humiliated in front of their peers, that also helps keep things pure.

And of course, the strongest defense against any kid of crime is the feeling that you will get caught. Ergo, there has to be a hell of a lot of mutual oversight in order to keep peope on the narrow path.

But even with all that in place, there will be corruption, because with enough money anything can be overcome.

That’s why the war on drugs is so futile. The inherent demand for narcotics is so absurdly high that it supports sky high prices, which in turn make the narcotic trade extremely profitable, and ensures that those in the trade always have lots of cash to use to compromise the system.

The exact same thing happened with Prohibition. Guys like Al Capone could get away with it all because they had enough cash to bribe all the gatekeepers they wanted, from the cop on the street to the politicians in the capital, and nobody has invented a form of government that can withstand that kind of power.

And the same thing happens today with modern petro-states. With billions of dollars in easy money on the line, the forces of corruption and anarchy always have plenty of cash to buy all the politicians they can eat.

And to hell with the people.

Thus, we see how the greatest enemy to public order is private wealth, and the argument can be made that either people simply should not be allowed to accumulate that much money. or an extremely powerful oversight body needs to be in place to make sure that money does not translate into political power.

To my mind, keeping people from getting too rich seems a lot more efficient.

And when they whine about their rights, remind them that all rights have limits, so why not the right to accumulate wealth?

Then tell me what their reply is…. I am dying to know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because it’s not longer than avering, but it is thicker.

And now you know!

Anyhow, as you have no doubt deduced, it’s time for me to alienate everyone by talking very explicitly about my so-called sexuality.

Maestro, a little gay furry porn to set the mood, please?

What got me on this subject (apart from sheer perverse horniness) was the realization that spend most of my time terribly pent up.

It just took me this long to notice because for me, that’s normal. That is my default state. I have arguably never not been a little pent up because between growing up in a small town in an era when being out of the closet was not a good idea and being an urban hermit for most of my adult life, I have never had a period where I was getting the sort of sex that involves others on a regular basis.

Add in the problem of my brain going haywire when I try to have that kind of sex in the real world and you can see that I have quite the problem.

You know what my entire conception of my sex life was when I was a teen? Porn. That’s it. I thought the sex with others thing would never happen to me because I was so repulsive and nobody liked me or even cared about me, so I figured the sum total of my human sexual expression would be jacking my cock to gay porn.

Thank goodness the internet came along when it did. And furry fandom, come to think of it. AND I OFTEN DO.

See what I did there?

Hmmm. This needs more porn. Avert thine eyes, Julian, because I am about to post porn of some Ducktales characters :

I have a ton more of that, if anyone is interested.

Anyhow, where was I….oh right, my solo sex life.

By the time I was out of my small and into an urban area where there were plenty of gay venues and events where I could meet hot dudes and maybe start sowing those wild oats I have heard so much about, I was cripplingly depressed and socially anxious and more or less an invalid in many ways.

So it was getting myself to the Happy White Squirting Time in front of the computer from that point on too. Even when I lived in a household with three gay nudists and a dog named Zane, my sex life was solo because I was way too shy to ever approach any of my roomies for sex.

And I mean, we’re furries. Friend sex is kind of our thing. We’re cool like that.

Oh, and then antidepressants entered the picture and my libido vanished. And for a good long time I didn’t miss it. After all, you don’t immediately miss an appetite. You aren’t getting sex and you’re not craving it either.

So where’s the problem?

That’s such a ridiculously narrow way of seeing things. I can see that now. I feel like my whole life I have been fooling myself by thinking I knew all the answers when all I was really doing is deluding myself with ego gratifying delusions.

But that’s for another blog entry.

Porn time? Porn time.

Eventually, however. my libido began to thaw out and re-awaken, and that’s when I realized that I really did miss it. I missed the warmth of it all. The way horniness had of melting the ice off my heart for a while and making me feel more human. The passion of it all made me feel more alive and more whole.

Plus, of course, sex is fun and feels wonderful. Can’t forget that.

Over the years, my libido thawed out even more, and that’s when I ran into the big problem that the antidepressants no longer kept me from getting horny, they just kept me from being able to get off.

No more Happy White Squirting Time. I could jack off all I wanted and all that would happen is that I would make myself very frustrated before having to stop because I just plain ran out of energy.

And that’s where I am now. And it sucks. I get off maybe once a month now, and believe me, it is not for lack of trying.

But more than that, I am increasingly aware that human beings are not supposed to have solo sex lives and that I really crave that non-solo sexy times stuff.

And that brings me right up against the wall of my social anxiety. It’s kind of hard to find bed buddies when the thought of meeting people you don’t know gives you the shakes.

Time for more porn! Indulge me, this is as close to sex as I get.

Remember, it’s not bestiality if the animal can talk, and as far as you know, that big grey doggy talks better than an Oxford don.

Hey, I just remembered where I was going with all of this!

My point, and I do have one, is that I have been very sexually frustrated for a very long time. So long that I have no idea what it is like to be anything else.

And on some level, I have known that for a long time. The only difference is that now, I realize that it might just be a problem, and that a lot of my depression might cum (ha) from a terrible case of the long term blue balls.

I dunno what to do with this information so here’s one more porn :

I don’t know how to solve the problem of my pent up jism, let alone the whole “sex with others” thing. Even if I could work up the nerve to arrange a liason via some hookup app like Grindr, I would be so worried that I would not be able to peform, or worse, not be able to get off.

Life was easier when I pretended this shit didn’t matter.

Not better. Just easier.

Well, clearly, the only solution is for me to become rich enough to hire all the mal prostitutes I want until I figure out how to get invited to the really good orgies.

Yeah. I will get right to work on that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still thinking about this whole “feeling like I am never doing what I am supposed to be doing” kind of thing.

First, let’s do some important affirmations.

There is nothing I am “supposed” to be doing.

I am perfectly free to live my life entirely for my own pleasure.

All that really matters is my own happiness, and if worrying about that ends up being too much of a hassle and becomes a liability to said happiness, I am free to ditch that too.

The last thing I need is to constantly worry about whether I could be happier. That would be even worse than feeling like I am never doing the right thing.

The main thing is to freaking relax. Live life for fun. Be a kid again. Stop worrying about what I should be doing. Stop thinking about all the things I could be doing too.

Basically, if it’s making me unhappy, fuck it.

It is perfectly acceptable to live life for fun. If I feel up to it, I can also listen to my own soul in anticipation of the day it produces one clear signal for me to follow and then follow said signal as far as it takes me.

But if that becomes a liability, it too can be discontinued until I feel up to it again.

Yes, I have ambitions. And yes, I have some pretty big dreams too. I dream of being able to live a normal life, with a husband and a job and a place in life, instead of having this big supercomputer brain that isn’t hooked up to anything.

But those ambitions and dreams are my own, to do with as I please. If they motivate me to do things, great. If they only serve to make me feel better about my current life, that’s perfectly fine too.

But if they are only cudgels my overactive superego uses to beat me, then they too can die a thousand deaths.

Essentially. my overactive superego needs to fuck of and die in a chemical fire. It is what has become toxic, not me. I am fine. In fact, I am downright amazing.

So I hereby command my overactive superego (who works for ME and not the other way around) to back the fuck off. You are terrible at your job and you try my patience and if I could, I would get rid of your completely.

But the human psyche kind of needs one, so instead, I am warning you to learn to behave or face the consequences.

You, too, can be judged and found wanting. In fact, you just were. Fucker.

This means you are no longer free to feast upon my own flesh and take my hidden anger out on myself. That shit stops right now.

There are worse things in life than taking it out on others, especially if that can be done in a constructive way.

And it is perfectly fine if my life isn’t going anywhere because I am sick. I swear, I am going to keep telling myself that until it sticks. In as much as it matter, all society really expects of me is that I do my best to get well.

That’s why I am going to stop myself when I start to feel bad about myself for being this giant brain with such enormous potential that I am “wasting” and remind myself that it’s my potential and ergo serves my own needs and my own happiness and that I don’t owe the world a god damned thing.

And as for all those things I feel like I “could” be doing and therefore “should” be doing, am I really being realistic about it? Could I really be doing these things given how unwell I am, or is that just something that I tell myself to feel better?

If so, those dreams need to be thrown out because they have gone bad and been subverted by my evil superego into just another way to harm myself.

Well I am done harming myself. Fuck that noise. All that matters is my happiness. All these other concerns that swarm around my head like gnats from hell can go fuck themselves to death with a rusty razor blade.

If I want to play video games all day, I will. But not because it’s the only way to escape the inner torment of my evil superego.

It will be because that is my current best guess as to what will make me happy. But that’s all it is, a guess. I am free to try other things without worry or care because I am not betting my entire escape on it.

Because there is nothing to escape. The demon at the door is gone. He was never real in the first place. He was just a puppet I used to scare myself. But I don’t need to do that any more. I see through his bullshit and have kicked his ass to the curb.

Sure, I am opening the door to a lot more possibilities in my life now that I am no longer going to give in to this feeling of never doing what I am supposed to be doing.

But that, too, is subject to change if it interferes with my happiness. The door is open for when I feel like going out to explore, but I am under no obligation to do so.

Now let’s finish up with a great big primal id statement :

I AM HERE.

I AM ALIVE.

I AM REAL.

I DESERVE TO BE HERE.

I DESERVE MY FAIR SHARE OF THE GOOD THINGS IN LIFE.

I HAVE NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF AND I CAN HOLD MY HEAD UP HIGH IN THE WORLD WITHOUT FEELING LIKE I HAVE TO APOLOGIZE FOR LIVING.

LIFE IS EITHER GOING TO MAKE ROOM FOR ME AT THE TABLE OR I WILL MAKE IT MAKE ROOM FOR ME AT THE TABLE.

IT IS TIME FOR ME TO GET MINE.

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been reevaluating how I value things.

Or rather, how I value things. As opposed to, say, experiences. And it’s made me realize how apparently reasonable, rational, sensible thought can lead to heartbreak, misery, and starvation of the soul.

Here is my current scenario to use as a jumping off point :

Last weekend was VancouFur. As often happens at conventions, I overspent. That makes that, by my usual rubric, I can’t afford to order in tonight.

But I ordered in anyway, and here is why.

For some reason, even though I have skipped my Saturday night meal many times before with no ill effects, this time the prospect of doing it again was really depressing me. I was actually dreading the moment I would have to make it official by preparing my more usual kind of meal.

So I made the command decision to order in anyway and worry about the $ later.

This is not my usual mode.

I usually see the world through the lens of my poverty and how it means, or so screams my superego, that I have to be super careful and sensible and pragmatic about how i spend every single penny of it or disaster will ensue.

And that can be a very powerful way of looking at the world.
It can lead to a positive hedonic equation in that you are careful to get as much pleasure and joy from each dollar that you can.

And that sounds great on paper, but in practice, the fine distinctions disappear and the message turns into a more generalized sense of constant fear and insecurity about your money and makes it very hard to keep yourself happy because you end up with a very rigid and unforgiving mindset that equates being sensible with being safe.

And that just ain’t so. You can be so “sensible” that you makje yourself utterly miserable. Human thriving requires a more flexible sense of value that includes (for instance) the possibility of spending more than you “should” in order to treat yourself when you really need it and simply accept that this will mean going without something else in the future.

And that said outcome is not the end of the world. Nobody is going to lock me away for the crime of imprudence.

The real test will come Tuesday night, when my friends and I go out to eat and I can’t afford to order anything.

Anyhow, I finally remembered what I meant to talk about tonight.

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What I should be doing

Nothing. Or a lot of things. Depends on how you look at it.

I shall explain.

I realized recently that I have been “shoulding” all over myself lately. I had fallen back into the bad habit of feeling like I am never ever feeling that I am doing whatever it is I am “supposed” to be doing. The number of things on the list of things I am “supposed” to be doing is functionally infinite thanks to the magic power of neurosis and so the programmed outcome of all this is that I feel like there is no way I can choose which thing to do so I choose to do nothing.

Well, nothing substantial, at any rate. Nothing that matters to me or anyone else. Instead, I play video games all fucking day in order to escape this omnipresent sense of doing the wrong thing, and that’s pretty much how the ecology of my depression works.

And the hub of it is my sense of “should”.

Patient readers know that I have been here before. I wrote a blog post saying more or less the same things once before, years ago.

But right after I wrote that post, I started wondering where I was going to go from there. Because the thing is, it’s one thing to realize that there is this huge irrational force ruining your life and quite another to get rid of it.

Because to be honest, I have no idea what to replace it with. Even as I made all my bold statements about ridding myself of my bad case of the shoulds, I could feel the massive gap it left in my mind and I could feel the substance of my mind starting to slowly ooze into the hole, where if left unchecked, it would simply revert back to my previous way of thinking over time.

It was left unchecked.

And all for lack of a replacement. And the truth is, I still have no idea what to replace it with. It is beyond my considerable imagination.

I feel like a convict who has just been let out of prison and is standing there at the bus stop wondering what the hell to do NOW.

I suppose I would need some sense of direction and purpose to my life, and those are things I have never really learned to supply for myself.

The next best thing would be, I suppose, to somehow attach myself to something that could give me that sense of direction and purpose.

Like school did. The great thing about going to Kwantlen and VFS is that I always knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing : going to school and doing my school work. And I knew that as long as I got that done, I was okay, and the rest of the time, I could goof off and do whatever because I had the obligatory part of my life covered.

I was doing what everyone would agree was what I was supposed to be doing.

But then that ended and I was released into the unbstructured wilds with no mentor willing to help me take the next step. For a while, I coasted on the momentum from school and that helped me get the Uno gig.

But then I stupidly took that for granted and even more stupidly quit the job and still more stupidly did not immediately start hunting for another.

And so I lost all my momentum and drifted back into the doldrums and that’s where I was when I discovered Skyrim and everything went all to hell after that.

I still haven’t fully recovered from that.

So here I am, wondering how I hook myself up with another source of direction and purpose. Like school, but not school, because I am done with school.

I suppose that means I would have to join…. something.

I will have to think about that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I admit, I am kind of tempted to write another fluffy piece like yesterday’s blog entry.

That shit was so easy to write that I felt like I was getting away with something. Like I had somehow hacked the system. And objectively speaking, that article was a lot closer to the sort of thing I could actually sell to a magazine than my usual dense, imagistic, darker than fuck soul-searching prose.

So, stick a pin in that. It could be super important. But it’s not what I feel like doing in tonight’s blog entry.

Instead, we shall revisit the issue of my episodes of strange sensory effects.

I have spoken in this space before about strange visual effects. Like the time a flickering flourescent tube made me feel like my head was going to explode in elementary school. or how there have been times when someone was wearing something that glittered or sparkled in a way that I found extremely hard to stop staring at.

Yes I know I just ended a sentence with a preposition. And I know some English teachers say that is “wrong”. But personally, it’s never been something that I have ever had a problem with.

I have thought of other visual weirdness over time. Like times when lights blinking on and off, like on an Xmas tree or an emergency road sign, have given me that feeling I spoke of before that something is emptying out my mind and replacing the missing contents with pure white light.

It’s all very frontal lobe. And who knows, maybe if it didn’t freak me out so bad, I would be able to use such things as a form of mediation and reset my brain.

But it scares the ever loving nitrogen rich orangic fertilizer out of me.

Or how there was this one time that a particular bold (but non-clashing) color combination in a magzine ad for makeup felt like heat to me. Like the line where the colors met was a red hot knife. I could feel the heat coming off it.

But there has also being audience weirdness, and that’s what got me onto this subject tonight because I experienced some of it tonight.

My roomie Julian has a tendency to leave the Stingray electronic dance music channel playing as background music. And for the most part, that is not a problem.

But there is a particular technqiue some songs use in order to create a more ‘pumped up” kind of sound – a way of making it sound like the whole song is pulsing in and out to the beat by maximizing the volume dynamics.

In other words, it makes everything go JWAH JWAH in and out like you are experiencing a negative brain event.

Or at least, that’s how it effects me. It’s like the JWAH effect goes straight into my brain and makes me feel like all of reality is pulsing in and out along with all the blood in my head and it makes me terrified and nauseous and like my head is going to explode.

So that’s the kind of shit I just can’t be around.

And that’s…. pretty weird. Pretty sure that’s not something that happens to most people.

I would have heard about it if it did.

But that’s not even my real topic for tonight because what I really want to talk about is how very very weird it is that these things have happened to me for my entire life and yet it never occurred to me to tell anyone about it.

What the fuck is up with that?

My first approximate answer is that one of the dire side effects of my social isolation and the developmental damage it caused is that as a kid, I had no idea what was normal.

Sure, it’s easy to see now that these weird effects are the sort of thing someone should really have been told about back then, but at the time I was just a kid and had no idea how to draw the line between harmless mental strangeness and the kind of thing that prompts emergency cranial ultrasounds.

But that’s not really it either. Or at least, not all of it.

The real nub of the whole thing is that my way of coping with all this mental weirdness was to cope with it while it lasts and then immediately scrub it from my mind after.

Not in a cognitive sense – clearly I remember the events.

But in a working mind emotional sense. I cleared all the upset and terror and confusion from my mind and more or less rebalanced my mood by sheer force of will.

So while I did not forget the incidents, I did mark them as “not safe to think about” and that made any kind of sustained response impossible.

You can’t tell anyone about something when you can’t even think about it.

And more than that, going to others for help was simply not something I did back then. To put it very mildly, was a behaviour that was both actively and passively discouraged in me, the unwanted and unloved child.

So I had to cope with absolutely everything completely by myself right from the very first day of elementary school.

That’s so incredibly wrong. No kid should have to raise themselves. They are bound to do a very bad job.

After all, they are just kids. Even the ones who talk like grownups and radiate intelligence and seem to know more than most adults.

I still needed everything other kids needed. Love, support, affection, a sense of belonging and safety and having a place in the world.

It’s not my fault I was born with an overabundance of IQ. That I was too smart for my own good. That I was too clueless to know that I should not be constantly showing off how frigging smart I was.

I still do that. I think it’s pretty fundamental to my personality. I need to shine. Like most artists, I have a powerful need to express myself and I would rather shine alone in the dark than hide my light under a bushel around others.

I gotta be me, baby. Now and forever. This is not negotiable.

But that should not mean I have to be alone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I probably should talk about all the deep psychological; shit that came up in therapy today, and thus work through just a little more of my deep seated issues.

And I still might. But I am also going to allow myself to get all excited and enthused about all the music I glommed today!

WARNING : The following will contain a crazy amount of Youtube-age.

It all started with this wonderful video :

It’s like it was made for me, because all I need, at my age, is for something to remind me of songs I like so I can go download them.

So these six second clips are damn near perfect. They are just long enough for me to remember the song then it’s on to the next one.

For someone with my memory for music, that’s all it takes.

If that’s not your bag, though, I don’t recommend watching the video. There is a lot of utterly forgettable early 2000s crap in there. Boring ballads, hip hop that is more like flipflop, genre-less crossover trash, it’s all in there.

But there were gems amongst the detritus, and that’s what I want to share.

I started off with this wonderful gem from my childhood :

I prefer that version to the Carpeters one, by the way. The Carpenters version is overproduced and feels kind of forced.

Anyhow, I absolutely adore that song. It expresses that whole 70’s UFO worship feeling so well, and I adore UFO cults.

It’s like they are science fiction’s children. They have such noble ideas and such fervent hope and such wondrous wild eyed wonder at this universe of ours.

Sure, they may seem a tad credulous, and I suppose a lot of the more boring kind of science fiction fan would not want to be associated with them, but science fiction provided the vivid imagery upon which they base their faith, and so I feel, just a little bit, like we are responsible for them.

And their faith is, at least to someone raised outside religion like me, no more absurd than tales of the Biblical flood or resurrected Jewish cult leaders.

And what the hey. Nowhere in the song do they say they know this beautiful idea of theirs will work.

But it might.

So what the hell!

Next up, the only fresh discovery from today’s panning for gold :

Now THAT is some seriously funny shit. It’s such a bang-on parody of the sappy slow-jam love songs of a certain era that I am thrilled by its subversion of a cliche.

And because I know some people will jump to this conclusion. no, the song is not misogynistic. Nowhere does he state any generalizations about women. His anger is directed at one specific woman, and if all he is saying is true, she deserves it.

Anger at a person is not the same as anger at their gender (or race, or religion, or… ). A lot of people will respond to a song like this based not on its contect but based on the fact that they are so unused to seeing men direct anger at women without it automatically meaning the man is wrong.

He doesn’s threaten her physically. He doesn’t say anything about women in general. He doesn’t even say there will be consequences.

And the truth is, if it was a woman saying similar things to a man, you wouldn’t be upset.

And that’s just straight up sexist, yo.

And now, to take things in the exact opposite direction :

Yes, I know. It’s a super sappy ballad. And I don’t, as a rule, go for those.

But god damn it if it isn’t one of the best sappy ballads I have ever heard. And I am, deep down, a romantic softie, and I love the heck out of this song.

Remember, there ain’t but two kinds of music : good, and bad. Every genre of anything only exists to guide people toward other media they might like.

They’re not supposed to become a defining part of your identity or your membership badge for a certain culture or clade.

They are merely file tabs in the media folders of life.

Next up : a song that some of you might STILL be sick of :

And to be frank, when the one hit wonder video spit this one out, I was dubious. I remembered it as just another mindless summer hit.

But I gave it a listen anyhow, and found I quite liked it. I love its pumped up hard-driving energy and its lyrics about how much it sucks when the assholes show up and wreck the vibe (and worse, your chances with the ladies), and the rapper’s gravely Jamaican voice fits the overall canine vibe of the song perfectly.

So what the hell. Who let the dogs out? I did, motherfluffer.

And finally, bet you haven’t thought of this song in a long time!

I certainly hadn’t. So imagine my surprise when I realized I still remembered the lyrics!

I hadn’t heard the song in like twenty years but the minute I heard the music it all came back to me. And I am like, wow.

Sometimes I even amaze myself.

And obviously, I love the song. It’s another example of a type of song I don’t normally care for – in this case one of those lady vocalist dance-ish songs that get heavy rotation at gay venues – but such a good one that it doesn’t matter.

One thing it doesn’t need – more cowbell.

Well, that’s it for the ones I feel like sharing. I also downloaded Cars by Gary Numan, All Right Now by Free, Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Karnes, and Smooth by Santana.

Getting more music always makes me happy.

And I have so much music stored in my head that I know that I will never run out of things I like to download.

All it takes is a little reminder.

Wow that was easy to write. I should do fluffy stuff like this more often!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel so weak lately.

And not just in the physical sense, although there is plenty of that too. On the physical level, I feel like I am a trembling invalid in the grips of an old timey disease like malaria.

But that’s probably just the unstable blood sugar that is methodically killing me. So, you know, no big deal.

I’m too mentally ill to do much about it anyhow.

No, the kind of weakness I am talking about is the emotional kind. I really feel like I have no strength to fight the bad messages from my broken brain lately. I keep knuckling under to its demands and it is getting me down.

Witness : all the convention I missed in order to keep that damn thing happy last weekend. It’s like having a dangerous and rapacious pet.

And I am not sure where this comes from. I know there have been periods when I had plenty of fire in my belly to tackle and destroy my depression, but that seems like forever ago now.

The problem, I feel, is that I have no pilot light. If flame goes out, there is no deep source within my soul to draw upon in order to re-kindle my soul’s fading fire.

To, as usual, over-extend the metaphor, without a pilot light, all I can do is wait for lightning to strike and give me fire again, like the cavepeople at the beginning of Quest For Fire after their fire went out.

Meanwhile, I can’t push back against the darkness because I have no traction. I guess that is what happened when your soul is filled with ice and snow. It doesn’t matter how much mental force, of whatever kind, I can bring to bear via this outsized engine of a mind of mine… without traction, all it can do is push me backward.

I need soul friction, damn it.

Instead, I just keep sliding though life on that slippery slope that ends with the grave. The days slip through my numb and nerveless fingers and I watch my life going down the drain with a strange detachment, like it was happening to someone else.

On television. To a character I didn’t care about one way or another.

And I know this bizarre clinical detachment’s lab coat and stethescope are just the bullshit props of a very broken mind that can’t take life in realtime. let alone handle real emotions, the kind that threaten one’s suicidal self-control.

There are times, I must keep telling myself, when you should not detach. I realize as I am writing these words that I have spent a long time slaving under the belief that I am always better off being detached and “logical” about everything. Even in moments of strong emotion, where emotional detachment is hideously wrong on so many levels, there is always a part of me sitting outside it all, analyzing everything so that I always choose the “right” or “smart” path.

It’s not entirely false. I am one of those people, like Robert Anton Wilson said, that always wants to know what’s really going on.

In the service of that noble and sensible sounding mission, part of my mind stays detached from every situation. And it is very easy to fool myself into thinking that there’s nothing wrong with that. That, in fact, it’s the right thing to do.

But now I can see that there are things you simply cannot see from the safety of a seat at the center of things. That this submersible of mine that keeps the waters of the deep at bay so I can explore in comfort and safety is actually what is cutting me off from the desperately needed emotional inputs that might actually heal me.

There are things that I can never learn and truths that I will never see unless I learn to get out of my shark cage of a life and swim naked in the waters of my emotions.

They’re very deep.

I need another period of opening my heart to let the emotions in, not caring if they “detach” me from the place I cling to like a barnacle as long as they can wash me clean and let me live anew.

This would all be so much easier if I had religion, damn it. If I had a faith, I wouldn’t be stuck playing this strange game of chess against my own emotions. With religion, I would have that source, that pilot light, to re-light my flame. My mental software would contain that permission to generate much needed emotional inputs when necessary.

Compared to that, all my oh so impressive skills of inference and analysis seem like a jug and kazoo band next to the mighty orchestra that is religion.

Oh well. At least I have a really great view of the world up here on this mountain where I am dying of hypothermia, frostbite, and lack of oxygen.

It’s a nice place to die, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Perhaps spring will bring me some renewal. God knows I could use it. Perhaps when the days are longer and the sun is brighter and green things are sprouting everywhere, I will find what I am missing and reconnect to the breathing, living world.

I still have so much ice to birth. So much frozen pain wrapped around this little heart of mine like a blanket of snow waiting for me to dig it up and spread it out in the sun to melt. It can seem so much like that spring will never come.

But winter always ends. The thaw always comes. It’s one of the very few things in life in which you can have total faith. The world keeps turning as it spins through space and time flows ever onwards. The wheel never ceases its spin, and if we are patient, and if we are wise enough not to fight it, it will brings us back into the sun again.

I hope to be that wise some day.

But I still have so very much to learn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not in the Sunset. The gears.

Been pondering my seemingly irresolvable psychological deadlock today. It and only it is the real issue in my life because it is the thing that is keeping me from moving on with my life and seeking to make my fortune with my skills.

My mad, mad skills.

So let’s slow the whole syndrome down and try to figure what the fuck is actually happening when this thing is actively blocking me.

First, I cast my mind outside my tiny and ultimately very sad little kingdom here. And not in an abstract, theoretical way – the “I could….” way.

No, it has to be in the mode of the actual contemplation of action – “I will… “.

And it has to be immediate. Not “Someday, I will” because that’s total bullshit and worse than useless. It has to be “I will do this thing right now or quite soon”.

Next comes the reaction. This is the crux of the matter and deserves specific attention. It is the primary enforcement mechanism of my mental illness and in theory, if I could detroy or disable it, I would be free.

During said reaction, two things happen : a wave of icy cold fear rises up from deep inside me like an arctic wind and plunges my heart into the blood chilling water of the North Atlantic where it nearly dies (or at least that’s how it feels).

At the same time, I feel a profound psychological pain that feels like it is going to rip my skull open from the inside. It also grates on my nerves like squeaky chalk, and most of the time it also jangles said nerves.

The only time it doesn’t is when I am too depressed to care.

Finally comes the effects of said reaction : I shrink back from the disturbing thought and immediately and powerfully blot it out of my mind and then erase the evidence that it had ever been there in order to keep the disturbance from upsetting me any further and possibly spreading till it becomes like a panic attack, but far worse.

An existential panic attack, more or less. The kind where it feels like your whole world is about to fall apart and then you will be cast into a void of pure chaos where nothing makes sense, there is no such thing as predictability, and ordered minds die gibbering like the lunatic you now are.

Looked at like that, it’s no wonder this shit has been kicking my ass for so long. There’s some powerful mojo going on there. My mind has perfected ways of keeping me whipped and docile and deconstructing and disabling that kind of thing is going to take a lot more than a handful of insights that bring no real change.

Back to the reaction. The fear part of it is relatively easy to apprehend. As my colorful use of language implies, deep down it’s really the fear of chaos and the unknown. My depression has trained my mind to react to even the slightest idea of real personal change like it’s a holocaust inside a hurricane and will surely cast us – or rather, me – down into the oblivion of madness and hysteria.

Seems a tad overdramatic, n’est-ce pas?

So that’s an area that could be worked on. There must be a way to desensitize my mind enough so that it doesn’t freak out so easily.

Hmmm. I think that would take a deeper structural change in my psyche. One that would increase my feeling of stability and safety and give me some solid ground to stand on when my inner storms are howling for my blood.

The pain component of the reaction is more complex. Certainly, the pain of trying to force a jammed mechanism is a big part of it. This overdeveloped mind of mine is a very powerful engine and when an engine that powerful gets jammed, all its power goes into the structure of the mind itself, and that really fucking hurts.

If you are having trouble with that metaphor, imagine a huge clock like Big Ben. Now imagine someone throwing a literal wrench into the gears. All the power that normally moves those huge hands around is now being applied to that tiny spot where the wrench is jammed in, and before long, Big Ben would rip itself apart.

I saw a cartoon once where something like that happened. It was extremely upsetting.

But I feel like there is something more to this pain. There is also a short circuit kind of feeling, like I am plugging something in but the power cord is broken. Like some part of me is trying to wake up but can’t quite make it.

The sleeper must wake. But its attendents won’t allow it.

Five more minutes, Ma!

I think this feeling of painfully incomplete connection is the most direct form of what I have be calling The Damage.

Yes, it’s capitalized now. Deal with it.

It is this Damage that is the real barrier between me and the world of humanity. It is what keeps me from being able to truly connect with others and draw on them for strength when I am feeling down. It’s what keeps me so profoundly psychologically isolated that I feel like I am always wandering naked in Siberia, with only my constant motion keeping me from freezing to death.

Hmm. No wonder I never stop. Always forward. Never stop. Stopping is dying. Keep going. Something terrible will happen if I stop.

I might never start again, for one.

The Damage is the exact kind of emotional scarring that turns some people into victims of Asperger’s syndrome. I am not sure why it did not do so with me.

Presumably the first four years of my childhood were stable and healthy enough to give me some kind of fundamental strength that pulled me through when my world was shattered by a rapist.

Amazing the damage one penis can do.

I was quite happy as a kid up until that point. That must be what saved me from the terrible conclusions that Aspeger’s patients come to about the world.

And I thank Dog for that. My world is cramped enough without a lack of/fundamental rejection of/ irrepairable damage to my empathy to deal with.

My body might be stuck to the spot and my mind might be locked in a feedback loop, but my soul can fly.

And that’s a big part of what keeps me relatively sane.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.