I am not a whole person. Except, perhaps, in potentia.

I am a whole person in the same sense that an acorn is an oak tree.

Now relax, I am not saying I am something horrible. I am just acknowledging the fact that my mental illness did not only isolate me from society but also from all the usual life experiences that make someone complete.

You all know the drill. Never had a job that supported me. And the jobs I have had are at least twenty years behind me. I honestly do not know what it is like to work for a living. I never have. Perhaps I never will.

If I am to generate an income for myself, odds are it will not be via traditional employment. It will be through my creative works in some fashion.

Aaaaaand I have never been in a relationship. Never fallen in love. Never even had a sex life, for fuck’s sake.

Which reminds me : I need to confess, in this space, that it’s very hard for me to have sex. And that’s not just because of the antidepressants. The truth is that when I try to have sex, no matter how horny and into it and everything else I am, a powerful psychological reaction is triggered and it is determined to make me regress into the safety of my mind just like I did when I was raped.

So what happens is that this intense counter-reaction fills my mind with electric ice and makes me quite stupid and thick-witted and slow. And passive.

Ever so passive.

It’s not what I want at all and it has given previous lovers the impression that they were doing something wrong or that I did not find them sexy.

The truth is far stranger and more depressing than that.

And I know of only one way to escape it : take myself and my needs out of the equation entirely. Turn sex into a performance instead of intimacy. Concentrate on knocking their socks off with my mad sex skill and take their ejaculation as my applause.

It’s a neat trick because my partner is highly unlikely to object and I get to take my bow and slink away to wonder what the fuck is wrong with me.

That’s just the strange kind of bird I am. I am far better at performing than living. Like m’man Will Smith says. “my life is a cage but on stage I’m free”.

Something very deep goes haywire when I try to pursue my own desires. Some fundamental circuit ends up feeding back into itself and then short circuits, and I am left paralyzed and confused by this misfunction.

Perhaps the problem is that I see myself in my desires and I still cannot stand my own image. Something in me violently attacks/rejects anything that mirrors who I am, and so pursuing my own wants and desires is doomed from the start.

Maybe I just plain can’t handle getting what I want. It’s too intense and too real. My far too sensitive circuit breaker kicks in and severs the connection and the energy flows back into the system when it was suppose to go into the world.

And just adds to my profound emotional constipation.

Maybe the problem is that I still can’t accept who and what and how I am. Maybe because I don’t really know. It’s hard to find out who you really are when your mind goes sizzle crackle POP whenever the subject of yourself is approached at all.

These are the sort of identity issues that one is supposed to sort out via life experience when one is young. But I socially died early on in that process. The insulation of isolation took hold and got thicker and thicker over the years until I can’t feel a god damned thing any more.

I am so, so far from the Sun.

And when I think about it, I can feel the profound wrongness of how my life went. I can tell you exactly where all those miles and miles of taiga and tundra inside me came from. They came from days and weeks and months and years of total social isolation. They came from sitting there surrounded by my fellow students and feeling alone and worse than alone.

Feeling like I didn’t even belong there. Feeling like everyone hated me and thought I was pathetic and wished I would just go away.

I’d rather be alone at home. I can ignore it when I am home. When I am alone, I am not surrounded by happy, healthy people whose very connection to one another throws my disconnected and distant self into sharp relief. Alone at home, I am no longer a starving child surrounded by a feast he cannot touch.

So alone at home I stay,
And do what I can to pass the time away
While watching my life wash away
Into meaningless, purposeless foam.

Nothing I do is meaningful. Nothing I do matters. Nothing I do leaves an impact on the world. Nothing I do expresses who I am.

And maybe that’s not a coincidence. I can’t very well express who I really am when I don’t even know who I really am and probably would reject it if I knew.

That’s why it all has to come out through poetry and metaphor and other literary decides. That’s why I can only express who I really am when I am wearing a mask. I have to be sure that I will never catch a glimpse of the real me before I feel safe enough to express some small but vital part of who I am.

The night is always cold inside me, and sunrise never comes.

I cling to others for their heat, and share my bright warm light with them in hopes that come of it will reflect back to me.

But still I sit at the bottom of a frozen sea.

With none to rescue me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just keep making it.

And I can’t seem to stop hating myself for it.

And I don’t know what to do,

See, yesterday, I was all set to go to the Furries in the Media panel at VancouFur, which is going on right now. But I ain’t there.

Anyhow I was set to go but then I realized I was still quite sleepy and felt sort of ill so I decided to skip it and go to the con later that day, on my own.

And this was, in as massive a way as possible, the wrong choice. Once I made it, I immediately started regretting it, and after doing my damned best to tell myself that it was no need to beat myself up over it and it was not that big a deal and other ways to keep the self-loathing at bay, I could hold it back no longer and so it flooded into my and I spent a long time absolutely loathing myself with the heat of a thousand suns.

And then today, I did it again. Decided not to go to the last day of the con so I could stay home, get caught up on sleep, and blog.

And yup, now I hate myself even more than before because I know it was the wrong choice. I would be much happier at the convention , even though there were no panels or events I cared to attend. I could be visiting the Dealer’s Room – I have a tiny bit of room in my budget for purchases. I could be hanging out in the Video Game Room or the Board Game Room. Or I could be just circulating, hoping to bump into furs I know, and just basically making myself socially available.

But no. I very stupidly decided to stay home and do the exact same dumb shit that I do all the goddamned fucking time and that is always available to me, unlike the con.

And the thing is, I could still go, If I got dressed and got my ass into a cab, I could catch the last hour and a half of the con.

And yet, no I can’t. I literally can’t. I can’t make my brain make that decision. It’s like there is a circuit locked in my mind and until it powers down and unlocks, I have no power over myself.

And that’s a scary fucking thing to realize. Everything in our society says you are always free to choose between the options available to you. Existential freedom is absolute, and all that jazz.

But no, it isn’t. Or at the very least, in order for that statement to be true, one must postulate a fairly flexible definition of what counts as “an available option”.

After all, if you can’t make the choice, it’s not really available, is it?

That comes dangerously close to devolving into tautology.

Tell me that’s not fun to say.

And the other thing is, part of me definitely know that this is actually no big deal. It’s just a convention. I awas unfortunately too sick to attend as much as I liked. Excrement occurs. I am, after all, a very sick man and that’s not something I can just shake of whenever the hell I want.

Tomorrow will be just another Monday, this whole thing will be over, everyday life will resume, and this whole sordid affair will be behind me.

And beating myself up over the whole thing won’t change a goddamned thing. The thing about the pass is that it has passed. It’s gone. Fixed. Unchangable. Forever,

So why hate myself over it?

Who knows. Maybe this is just something I need to go through. Yet another wave of emotion to process. Maybe that’s the whole reason I made the wrong choice twice.

So that I could unleash all this irrational self-loathing and force myself to deal with it.

I know one thing : I feel like the stakes are pretty high for me lately. Psychologically speaking. I feel like this long dragged out tragedy that is my life and my recovery is finally reaching something like a climax and that things could go very well or very poorly any minute now.

It’s the inevitable result of my steadily reducing the amount of “space” in my mind where my emotions can go to hide. For around a year now, any time a pocket of that “space” was empty, I filled it in.

So I can’t dodge my emotions any more. There’s no room to manuever any more. And that means I got to deal with them.

That’s the idea. I won’t get better without dealing with all the pain and rage in me. I sometimes visualize it has a bulldozer pushing trash over the edge of a cliff slowly but unstoppably and at the bottom of the cliff is my conscious mind and the garbage is all the unprocessed emotion I have accumulated over decades of emotional alienation.

Well, there’s no natural segue to this next thing, so…

Let me tell you what happened at Furry Speed Dating on Friday night.

First off, the fact that I went to the thing in the first place is huge. For someone with social anxiety, speed dating is hell. A nightmare. Having to meet a series of total strangers whom you know damned well will be judging you on everything you say and do and deciding whether you are good enough for them?

No fucking way.

And that’s why I went. For me, this was like bungee jumping times skiing Mount Everest raised to the power of running the bulls at Pamplona.

I figured if I could make it through speed dating, I would emerge with a great deal of psychological growth in the form of de-catastrophizing one on on interactions.

Well I didn’t make it through. But then again, the deck was kind of stacked against me by fate, so I don’t feel that bad about it.

It went like this :

1. Absolutely nobody wants to sit opposite me and thus be my first “partner” for this exercise. Oh great, it’s elementary school again.
2. Someone, a cute Chinese guy, eventually does sit opposite me, but he then gets up and goes all the way around the room to verify that there is literally absolutely nowhere else he can sit before returning. Well doesn’t that make me feel wonderful on the inside.
3. Said guy then tries to talk to me, but a) his English is very poor, b) his accent is very thick, and c) the room is very loud. So I can’t understand what he is saying most of the time.
4. The actual event begins and we are handed a piece of looseleaf paper and told to tear it in half. I try my best to do it right but immediately fuck it up anyhow, tearing the paper into random, useless pieces. A fellow sitting near be (that guy with the fake Russian accent) helpfull says “I am thinking you are very bad at that. ” , then adds, “In fact, I am thinking you suck at that. ”
5. We are given pens and told to put our names on one half of the paper. I look at my two random scraps and realize there is nowhere I can put my name easily. Plus, we have nothing to write on. I try to write Fruvous with the stupid piece of paper resting on my knee and it comes out like it was written by a ghost with a bad case of the shaking shits. Lovely.
6. I tell my very reluctant partner that I can’t do this and leave, because my now my anxiety level is so high that I can hear a distant humming and it feels like something is doing its damneded to stop my heart.

It’s like the whole thing was designed to break me. I was all ready to work my charms on someone but my charms are verbal and my partner was…. not. Not in English anyhow, and that’s all I speak.

So between rejection, language barrier, having my physical incompetence thrown into my face, and facing the prospect of having to hand my badly torn piece of paper with my badly written name on it to someone else as part of this whole game, I just Could Not and had to fuck off to the video game room, where I watched someone play some video game where you are an android pretending to be human while my anxiety level slowly fell over time.

Not a good experience at all.

So no wonder I was prone to bad decision making. That experience fucked me up. It’s going to be a long and inticate process to keep myself from drawing a lot of horrible conclusions from the event, such as….

A. I really am a hideous and unlovable thing that nobdoy will ever want
B. I am so life incompetent that I can’t even make it in a room full of other nerdy weirdoes with social anxiety
C. Romantic love will never happen to me because I don’t deserve it
D. I should never, ever, ever meet new people again.
E. I am nothing but a somewhat clever infant/

And so forth and so on.

I think I will bounce back in time. But right now, things are not good.

Life really is exceptionally cruel to me.

And I don’t fucking deserve it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like that should be the title for the entire blog.

What can I say, some of us don’t do well with labels. This blog is whatever I need it to be when I sit down to write and it’s kind of hard to label something like that accurately.

So ladies and gentlemen, let me present….. whatever the hell this is!

Crowd goes wild with confused applause.

Mood for the last two days has been medium crappy. My “NIHILIST HULK SMASH” mood has settled down to something more like halfway between “cranky” and “glum”.

I just feel so goddamned damaged lately. So weak and confused and unable to cope. And not at all in command of myself, which is tough for a male.

We’re raised to take responsibility for our actions. Even when they are beyond our control. No matter what, the buck stops here.

It all comes back to that perennial topic of mine, forgiving myself for being sick.

Put that way, the absurdity and the injustice of the situation become starkly apparent. Being sick is, by and large, something that it beyond your control, and that goes double (or more) for mental illness, because then the very thing making the decisions is not working right. Namely my brain.

But therein lies the fundamental paradox of my existence (or one of them, anyhow), because no matter how badly my brain functions and how poor and self-destructive the decisions it makes might be, I am still the only one in charge.

After all, existential freedom (and hence responsibility) is absolute. No matter how fucked up my brain is, I am still the only person who can make my decisions for me. Even if I give myself unto some sort of mental health facility (not an option – more on that in a bit) I would still be the person who decided to do it and I would still be the one deciding what to do when I am in there.

Now about my going into the hospital or literally anywhere else that could help a poverty stricken indolent like myself : I asked my therapist about it and he told me that as far as he knows, that is just plain not an option for someone like me. You know, a low dowdirty depressive and not something more fun and sexy like a psychotic or someone with borderline personality syndrome.

Heck, I don’t even have a history of suicide attempts or other thrilling things like that. I’m just a dull ol depressive and honestly, how dare I even suggest that the system should care about a well behaved loony like me?

It’s like I’m not even trying.

So I guess if I want to earn the attention of the mental health system, I will just have to go kill somebody. Wouldn’t that look cute at my trial.

DA : Mister Bertrand, why did you kill that man?

Me : Well I didn’t want to, but it was the only way I could get treated for my mental illness. You see, I suffer from depression, and the system….

Hmmmm. There must be a better way to indicate that something is not meant to be taken as part of the body text of the blog entry.

HTML needs a CUTAWAY tag,

Anyhow. Forgiving myself for being sick. Right.

It seems like a slam dunk logically. But of course, despite my extraordinary powers of logic, deductive reasoning, and humilty, I am still as illogical and irrational as any other human being, and crazy to boot.

Boy, it really hurt to publically disavow my membership in some kind of logic based elite like that. Fascinating. Apparently I had a lot more invested in being part of the “more logicla and sensible than thou” set than I ever realized.

Oh well, I am probably better off without it. Hard to forgive yourself for being sick when you can’t even forgive yourself for being human.

And maybe that’s what this whole thing boils down to in the end. I can’t even accept that I am nothing more than another human being like the other seven billion jumped up monkeys in the world. Like a lot of mental weirdos, I have invested so much in my own specialness that it has divorced me from my own humanity.

After all, it’s the only way to preserve any self worth once you have realized ….wait.

Nope! Not going to wander off into pontificating. Caught myself at it this time.

So, divorced from my own humanity. An inability to accept one’s human limitations does sound pretty terrible. It certainly doesn’t fit with my self-image as someone who faces the facts and doesnt harbor absurdly self-defeating delusions like that.

Which is, in and of itself, very human of me. Both the inability to accept my human nature and my believing that I was above that sort of thing somehow.

Well consider me demoted from the rank of angel and booted out of Secular Eden, then. I never really belonged there in the first place. It’s just where my self-esteem was hiding out and hoping not to be noticed.

The truth is that no matter how smart someone is, or how powerful their perceptions and powers of analysis are, or how much more of the chessboard of life they can see than the rest of the herd, or really absolutely anything else they can possibly boast of, they are still a goddamned monkey and the sooner they accept that, the better.

And of course, by “someone”, I mean me.

It just hurts less to phrase it as if I am telling it to someone else.

And to think I looked down derisively on Nietzsche for all his bitching about things he considered “human, all too human”.

And that from the man who taught me not to trust transcendentalists!

Truly, even the greatest of us are but capering fools in threadbare clothing.

Wow, what a truly pretentious thing to say.

How very human of me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

O WAIT. No I won’t., because tomorrow VancouFur begins and I likely will not have time to blog. Dammit.

Shit. I might not blog again till Monday.

OK then : I will talk to you nice people again Monday at the latest.

Now I have made myself feel terrible about missing a day!

I like to think that one of the courses you have to take to become a cop in London is the Official Sarcasm Class.

(Seargent-Instructor (SI) stands behind a podium in a typical college ampitheater. He is a thickly built man who speaks exactly like a London Bobby from central casting. )

SI : Alright then, ladies and gents, that concludes the theoretical part of your instruction and we shall now move on how to apply what you have learned in the field. I shall present you with a scenario and then call upon you to supply the correct response. Let’s start with an easy one. You are on patrol when you see a scuffle break out half a block away. You spring into action, running to the scene, and when you get there you say…

Hands go up.

SI : Alright…… you.

Student 1 is a young man of slight build and shy demeanor.

Student 1 (imitating SI) : Alright, alright, what’s all this then?

SI : Precisely! Well done. Now for something a little trickier. You are on car patrol. A recent model family vehicle tears past you at a hundred klicks. On goes the siren and you pull them over. You walk up to the open driver’s side window and say…

Hands go up.

SI : Okay…… erm, you.

Student 2 is a woman from India, and has that accent.

Student 2 (against imitating SI) : Alright, now just hold on here, where’s the bloody fire?

SI (beaming) : Absolutely correct! Write that down, people, that is the correct answer. Also, congratulations on including the officially approved intensifier “bloody”. Can anyone tell me why its use was appropriate?

Hands go up.

SI : Yes, you.

Student 3 is a tall thin British fellow with an upper class accent.

Student 3 : Because of the severity of the offense, sir?

SI : Precisely. The extreme speed of the vehicle, well above the legal limit for London street driving, meant the deployment of a mild oath like “bloody” was not only appropriate to the situation, it was, arguably, mandatory.

Student 3 : Are there circumstances where stronger language is allowed?

SI looks pensive for a moment.

SI : Well…. I’m not really supposed to tell you this but…. yes. For instance, in cases of extreme severity of offense, like the kind that puts the public at extraordinary level risk of life and limb or otherwise represents an especially strong danger to the peace and security of Londoners, you are authorized, pending review, to say “fucking” or “fuck”.

Student 2 : Can you give us an example?

SI : Well there was the time I pulled over a man who had just driven at full speed into a parade, nearly killing a dozen people, injuring nine of them, and scaring one poor horse to death. That was a scenario in which “what the bloody hell are you playing at?” seemed insufficient to the occasion.

Laughter from the students.

SI : Aside from that, there is one other scenario worth mentioning : in times of disaster or crisis wherein it is necessary to get large numbers of people out of harm’s way as quickly as possible in order to prevent loss of life, you are fully authorized to use every bloody curse word you know as long as it gets the fucking job done.

More laughter from the students.

SI : Well I can see that we are nearly out of time for today, so it’s time for an advanced scenario. You are on foot patrol when you see a person in black clothing stepping out of the window of a ground floor flat carrying expensive looking stereo equipment. You fix this presumed miscreant with your best police smile, and say…

Hands go up.

SI : Now it can’t always be the same people. Uh…. you there, in the back.

Student 4 is a nervous looking American.

Student 4 : Uhhh, me sir?

SI : Yes you. You are our lucky contestant for today. What would you say?

Student 4 gulps.

Student 4 : Um… I’m just an exchange student….. do I really have to….with the accent and the whole..?

SI : You most certainly do. Fire at will, sir.

Student 4 clears his throat loudly.

Student 4 : Um….. something like… “Well now…. just taking your stereo out for an evening stroll, I take it? ”

SI : Perfect. That will be all for today, students.

Well that was fun to write. Needs work – I think I lost focus somewhere in the middle. Were I the sort of writer who plans things out beforehand, such things would not happen. I would work all that out beforehand.

But I ain’t. Sometimes I wish I was. It would certainly make me feel more secure when I write. And I wouldn’t have to keep everything in my head till it’s written.

Alas, I am not that kind of writer. I have to go by the seat of my pants in order to maintain the motivation to write. If I write it all down and plan it all out beforehand, I lose all interest in actually writing the damn thing.

The creative energy has been released. Whatever I wanted to say has been said. Sure, it wasn’t in a form that is professional or useful. I just wrote notes. But that doesn’t matter. I am done.

And the very idea of writing if after the energy is gone is disgusting to me. As in, makes me feel quite queasy. Like used toilet paper gross.

Weird, I know, but nobody ever said art makes sense. If any kind of artist ever claims that they thoroughly understand their own creative process and have their muse thoroughly tamed, they are either lying or not very good, or both.

Even a recovering rationalist like myself knows that my inspiration does not come from the place of reason and light in my mind.

It comes from my deep emotional self. In fact, just recently, I have realized just how much of my mentation is intuitive.

Even my deeply analytical, seemingly logical thought processes have a very strong intuitive component. It’s always a very robust interplay between rationality and intuition.

I am pretty sure they call that genius.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty fucking depressed right now, so I figured, time to blog.

As you might have guessed (but don’t feel bad if you did not), I am back at the annihilistic phase of my mood cycle. Right now, I hate the world, hate life, hate reality, hate people, hate everything because everything is so loud and stupid and horrible and vile and meaningless to me and nothing has any fucking point.

Were I some mighty god, this would be the day I launched my biblical Flood, kicked off Rangnarok, intiated Armageddon, ended the Cycles, burned the sky, dropped the Bomb, and turned everyone’s ice cream to cream of tartar.

So here’s some random furry porn.

What the hell, I have to express my sexuality somehow. And redirecting rage into horniness is a time honored male tradition. Helps us stay domesticated.

Make love not war. Fuck for peace.

I have been thinking about my “damage” a lot lately. It’s good that I have a clear conscious idea of it now. It’s like I have serious and unhealable physical damage that makes me weak and fragile and now that I can feel it clearly, I can begint the process of learning to route around it and do what I want to do despite it.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that, because physical ailments are a lot easier to define and control. If your legs don’t work, your legs don’t work, and you simply (not easily, just simply) find ways to get around it.

My damage is much deeper than that, and far less predictable. And it’s entangled with things like my sense of self, and sense of reality, and my relationship with a world that has no idea I exist and doesn’t give a shit whether I live, die, or go insane.

And it’s hard not to take that personally.

Time for more gay fur porn.

And I am just so fucking sick of it all. All the bullshit of my life. Wasting my precious time alive playing video games all day while squatting in my own darkness and filth and inanity in an utterly pointless and futuile existence with no product, no meaning, no content, no substance, and no more evidence of my existence than a grease stain on the side of a highway where some roadkill once died.

Jesus fuck, that’s harsh even for me. I think I just shocked myself.

On the whole, that is probably a good thing. Spiritually instructive, or somesuch.

One last bit of fur porn for this half of today’s entry.

WARNING : it’s totally pedo.

Trust me, that’s much tamer than what I really wanted to post. I am one sick son of a bitch. Be glad no adults were involved.

Or nonanthros. Or…. bathroom substances.

Sometimes I wonder if there are other fetishes lurking in my brain.

But with those three, who needs any more?

They’re already enough to doom me.

Now where’s that goddamed line?

Not changing the furry art. It is what it is and it says what it says about me.

Kind of a relief to confess it, however obliquely. Having to hide a huge part of who you are for fear of total social ruin and becoming a figure so hated that normal, healthy people will gladly speculate on all the horrifying ways in which they would love to kill you really does crreate a great deal of stress in one’s soul.

It’s been a long time since I was in the closet about being gay. Once I left my home town, I didn’t give a shit who knew any more.

But there are a lot of other closets and I am highly unlikely to come out of any of the ones I have left – especially that last one – any time soon or maybe ever.

It’s not impossible that I will live long enough for the public opinion on people like me to soften – I have already seen faint evidence that the tide has turned in the form of bold articles bravely willing to admit that people like me might, in fact, be human beings with at least a couple of rights – but I am not going to hold my breath.

And I know I could be a powerful advocate for my people. After all, none of us asked to be the way we are and there is no cure, so it’s not like we could change if we wanted to do so. Nobody has the slightest clue how human sexual imprinting works, as as far as we know, it is permanent.

And that’s just as true for people like me as it is for homosexuals, people into BDSM, or those who have deep and intimate feelings about furniture.

Furnies, I think they call themselves.

I bet their conventions are amazingly well decorated. At first.

The world is so hostile to people like me that the liberal position is to very reluctantly admit that we might be human beings and so, just in case, we probably shouldn’t be exterminated en masse as long as we never, ever, ever have the kind of sex we want, or even look like we might want to do so.

Sounds kind of like the early days of gay rights, n’est-ce pas? I can only hope that out path to freedom goes even half as well.

And I know, deep down in my soul, that I could be a powerful advocate for our cause. I am articulate, passionate, forceful of personality and possessed of much wit and a good deal of likability. The perfect advocate.

But I can’t do that to my friends and loved ones. Makling oneself into the most hated person in the world is a risk I would gladly take for myself, but who am I to bring that kind of hate down on people associated with me?

And in a way that makes me feel like a coward. Where would we be if Martin Luther King had let that stop him? Surely the cause is important enough to justify the cost.

After all, there are millions of us in the world and we are all suffering in the shadows from all that we must hide in order to be safe.

And I could do a lot to free us.

But I am just too damned scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A place rather pretentiously called The Canadian Brewhouse (Bre Whouse?), as if there is only one, managed to get my business last night via two great words that go even better together : FREE PEROGIES.

That’s right. All Skip The Dishes orders in March are elegible for free perogies. And as it turns out,. it’s not some rinky dink little package of like six token perogies, like I thought it would be.

Nope, it’s a package of at least twenty of them, with chives and optional bacon bits. It’s enough to cover a whole dinner plate.

So hey, Canadian Brewhouse…. well done. I am eating your delicious perogies as I type these very words. YUM.

Actually. the perogies are just the loss leader that got me to check out their Skip the Dishes profile. What sealed the deal was they had DONAIRS.

Most of you who are not from the Maritimes region of Canada have probably never heard of donairs. They are basically specially seasoned meat stuff into a pita pocket, with a lovely creamy sauce, and I adore them.

Luckily, while I was going to VFS, the Mediterranean place a few doors from school turned into a place called something like the Donair Dudes, and so I got to have my first donair in decades from there.

But even though it said “Real Halifax style donairs!” out front, it wasn’t quite the same. This being the West Coast, it was still basically a falafel joint, and while I loved being able to get tabbuleh on my donair (damn I love that stuff), the whole thing had an air of healthiness and sensible eating habits that just doesn’t go with the donair experience where I come from.

I mean, the side dish to a donair shouldn’t be hummus.

It should be PIZZA.

Or fries. But this is Canada. the most French fry eating nation in the world (per capita) I think we can assume that everything either does or can come with fries.

The donair I got from the Canadiabn Brewhouse last night was more like it. Not only was it an enormous quantity of meat wrapped in a pita thick enough to stop a bullet. it came with fries, or in my case, poutine.

In other words, CHOLESTEROL CITY! I can afford to do that very occasionally because, despite my dubious diet, I have never had a problem with fat or cholesterol levels because I have never eaten a lot of fatty foods.

I’m a carbs fatty. not a meat fatty.

So last night I had a lovely meal which was both delicious and nostalgic. Among the many things I miss about my East Coast home, the whole Greco chain ranks highly amongst the things that are not people.

One thing I will never miss, though, is this goddamned ad.

That thing used to be on heavy rotation in the Maritimes. I would hear it like five times during a single episode of Voltron.

And so if you think that slogan is obnoxious hearing it ONCE….

And now it’s time for one of those seperator lines.

Reality is a Poison

And the purest water has no fish.

Been pondering the toxicity of the defenseless mind tonight. As you know, the subject of the necessity of a capacity for self-delusion in order to maintain a stable mood has been weighing on my mind lately.

Also, the subject of my complicated sentence structures. But whatever. I ain’t no Hemingway and my thoughts will never be short and punchy.

Anyhow, like I keep saying, I am convinced that some capacity for fooling oneself is needed if one is to be sane. That’s because sanity is dependent on the individual receiving a certain minimum level of a number of emotional inputs, and the mind therefore needs the ability to generate these inputs for itself when tney are absent.

And not only to generate them, but to do so in a way that is invisible to the conscious mind’s rational error-checking processes and thus immune from correction.

Now there are a lot of ways this kind of subconscious underwriting of mood can manifest. For example, a person might have a powerful a priori belief in themselves that requires no external verification.

In other words, some people believe in themselves just like out culture tells us all to do, without worrying about what others thing.

Others might anchor their mood in the love and affirmation they get (or got) from a very important person in their life, like a positive parent.

But by far the most used source for this sort of shoring up of mood is religion.

In religion, people can find whatever emotional inputs they need in a system which, at least in the thee big monotheistic religions, overtly and consciously denies the need for proof, or evidence, or anything other than itself.

Religion gives people a lot of other things for people, of course, like moral guidance, community, a cosmology (oy), and so on.

But its main function is to provide those emotional inputs that are lacking in a person’s life in a way that does not require justification.

Lonely? Jesus loves you.

A moral struggle troubling you? Ask your rabbi to help.

Scared? You are safe in the protection of Allah.

Absolutely any kind of deep emotional need can be met through “divine intervention”. Religion must be, therefore, both unchanging (for stability) and protean (to adapt to the needs of the individual worshipper).

The best religion, therefore, is one which has a stable set of broad based beliefs that can be adapted to as many situations as possible. Thus, the fundamental beliefs never change, and the official intersecessionary only needs to provide said interpretations.

It’s not that easy, but it is that simple.

But then there’s poor ignorant schmucks like myself, without a trace of faith in their lives and with plenty of emotional damage that could really use the exact sort of counterbalancing influence religion can provide.

Where other people have love and faith, all I have is antidepressants.

And it’s not the same at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Open on a run-down TV station’s broadcast studio. The equipment is from the 60’s and there is dust everywhere. It’s extremely quiet and the video has a slightly hazy quality, as if it’s very, very slightly out of focus. Sitting on an ancient beanbag chair is Mack, a furtive and nervous man, slight of build and grey of hair, who is chain-smoking compulsively. He is dressed in a very battered, tattered, and worn greatcoat and a taxi driver’s cap. He has a working-class London accent.)

Mack : So the cameras are rolling?

(Camera pans briefly to an ancient TV camera that looks like it’s more of a rat hotel than a working piece of technology. )

Producer (offscreen) : Uh…. yeah. Sure.

Mack : And this is going to go on television?

Producer (offscreen) : …it’s going to be on YouTube.

Mack : What’s that? A TV station?

Producer (offscreen) : Um…. yeah. A new TV station.

Mack : Good,. good. Bout time we got something new.

Producer (offscreen) : Now, can you state your name-

Mack (too fast, interrupting) : Call me Mack.

Producer (offscreen) : …right. Can you tell us what you do for a living?

Mack (laughing) : Living? Oh, we don’t use that term in my line of work.

Mack pauses expectantly for laughter. There is none.

Mack (coughs, squares himself) : Right. Well, I suppose you could call me a professional ghost chaser, although I always thought “liason with the pre-dead” had a nice ring to it. Very posh.

Producer (offscreen) : So you talk with the dead…. for a living?

Mack : If you can call it a living. The pay’s crap and the hours are long and nobody ever says a kind word. But we all must do what we were made to do, right?

Producer (offscreen) : And what makes that the work you’re made to do?

Mack : I see dead people.

Someone giggles offscreen but is quickly stifled. Mack is nonplussed.

Producer (offscreen) : Right. And what made you want to talk with us today?

Mack : Well, I just thought it would be nice if someone who actually knew what they were talking about told people about the world of the dead.

Producer (offscreen) : I see.

Mack : I mean, I’ve only been doing this kind of work since I was fifteen years old. and that was back when… well. let’s just say back when this studio was brand new, dig?

Producer (offscreen) : I dig. So what did you want to tell people?

Mack : That most dead people, just like most live people, are decent, hardworking entities that just want to live their afterlives in peace and quiet and have absolutely no desire to harm the living at all.

Producer (offscreen) : Is that so.

Mack : Damn right it is. The ones you hear about…yer, uh, ghosts, spirits, demons, phantasms, vampires, and werewolves and the like… they are the deranged killers oif the world of the dead. They are entities with something seriously wrong with their insubstantial minds that drives them to act out against the living. They are freaks and lunatics and in no way representative of the post-life community whatsoever.

Producer (offscreen) : I see. So most of the dead are harmless?

Mack : Exactly. But you never hear about them, do you? All the media focuses on is those few of them that act out, and that biases people against the dead. It’s like how in America, you only ever hear about black people when they commit a crime. So people end up thinking all black people are criminals. It’s the exact same thing.

Producer (offscreen) : Bigotry again the dead.

Mack : Exactly. It’s pure livism, is what it is. Er…. that is what we in the community call the preferental treatment given to the living.

Producer (offscreen) : Because they are alive.

Mack : Yes. Just for that.

Producer (offscreen) : Does everyone who dies become a ghost?

Mack : Can’t rightly say. And don’t ask me nothing about no afterlives either, see? Because I dunno that either. I’ve known dead people who seemed to disappear off the face of the Earth, but that could mean anything. And I have known living people who died and never showed up as a spirit at all. But if I had to guess, I would say that roughly one person out of five becomes a noncorporeal entity when they shuffle off this mortal coil and snuff it.

Producer (offscreen) : But…. that would mean there are billions of ghosts in the world.

Mack (laughs bitterly) : Yeah, and don’t I know it. And they all seem to have my number. Luckily, most of them don’t like being near the living, so they end up in all the lost and forgotten places of the world.

Producer (offscreen) : Are there any in the room right now?

Mack looks around perfunctorily.

Mack : Nope. Guess nobody cared enough for this place to stay here after they died.

Producer (offscreen) : I have to say I am relieved.

Mack : Understandable. You’re still prejudiced. Change takes time.

Producer (offscreen) : Going back to something you said earlier, are you saying that all those supernatural entities…. um. the ” ghosts, spirits, demons, phantasms, vampires, and werewolves and the like”… they are all just manifestations of the dead?

Mack : All the ones I’ve met have been. All post-living and all completely insane. I suppose some people just can’t handle life after death.

Producer (offscreen) : Must come as quite the shock.

Mack : Yeah, especially for them atheists.

A few offscreen people laugh politely. Mack beams.

Producer (offscreen) : Is there anything else you’d like to tell people?

Mack : Nothing comes to mind. Actually, wait, no… there is something.

Mack leans in towards the camera.

Mack (gently and sincerely) : Look…. all I really want to say is…. death… it’s not that bad. Okay? It’s really not that bad. So don’t worry about it so much. Sure, dying is terrible, but being dead…. it’s not that bad. You see? So relax and enjoy life.

After a few seconds of silence, Mack abruptly gets up.

Mack : Well gentlemen, it has been a pleasure sharing a conversation with you, but I am a very busy man, as you might have guessed, and I am already late for my next appointment. Toodle-oo!

Mack disappears. No flash, no sound effect, just gone. The studio breaks into dismayed and alarmed hubub.

Producer (offscreen) : Someone turn that damn-

Cut to black.

Not totally sure what I mean by that, but the words popped into my mind while I was making supper and I instantly well in love with them, so I had to share them.

There’s also this :

Got that off Facebook and thought it would make a good comedy setup

Freya : Come lovers, and embrace my gift of sublime connection.
A : He didn’t reply to a text for three hours and when he did, all he said was “u up?”.
Freya : BURN HIS FIELDS.

Freya : Gentle creatures, enjoy love’s feast, and be joyful.
B : She “tidied up” my records and threw out over $5000 worth of prime vinyl.
Freya : CRUSH HER ARMIES.

Freya : Erotic pleasure is my greatest gift to you. Rejoice in it.
C: The couple I am a “unicorn” for moved to Europe without leaving a forwarding address and they owe me over $9000.
Freya : Forgive them, for they are fools in love.
C : Oh. That’s okay, I guess.
Freya : Then SLAUGHTER THEIR KIN.

Unicorn = Bisexual willing to have sex with a het couple

Or I suppose I could go the other way :

D : My ex firebombed my office and is now in a tense standoff with twenty armed cops right outside my apartment building!
Freya : Aww, he must really love you.

Ick. On second thought, maybe not.

In other words,. I am feeling semi-good today. Dunno why, and don’t particularly care either. Better to enjoy it while it lasts than to kill it via analysis.

Repeat until believed.

Tried a game I got via a bundle I bought off Fanatical. That’s how I end up with a lot of odd games these days. I buy the bundle for the one thing and end up with anywhere from 2 to 8 other games I never would have bought seperately.

And I like that. I am a person with serious issues when it comes to stepping out of my comfort zone. I remember the agonies of indecision I went through when I was a kid and had read all the Asimov and Bradbury and I was faced with a science fiction shelf full of authors I had never heard of and knew nothing about.

So it’s good that I am ending up with games I would never get otherwise. It makes it effortless (almost) for me to try something new.

Today, I tried S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Clear Sky, and I can’t say I cared for it.

It just did not tell me enough, which I find oddly apropos for a game set in the Soviet Union of the 80’s.

Russians undercommunicating. Do tell.

The very first mission, the game tells casually me to “not go forward unless I throw a bolt in front of me. ”

And I am like, what the fuck does THAT mean? What bolts? Where? Bolts of what? Which button does that? WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK.

And here’s the thing : nowhere in the game itself does it tell you. I had to quit the game and Google it.

And to me, that is a major, major fail.

Then the game gives me objectives – which I love – but no good way to find them – which sucks. There is a map and a compass, but the map turns when you do and is therefore useless as a way to find absolute direction.

And I hate that in games. Does my head in completely. I am sure that actually makes it easier for them. But I ain’t one of them.

So that’s Strike Two. And it’s a big one, because the game immediately sets up a situation where if I don’t find the first objective fast enough, the friendly soldiers there start screaming things like “Where are you? We’re getting slaughtered here!”.

So, ya know. No pressure.

By that point. all that was keeping me playing the damned thing was that the story,. setting, and style interested me. Oh, and sheer bloodymindedness.

Mostly the latter,.to be honest. It was like the game was trying to get rid of me and I was determined not to let it.

Crazy, yes. But potentially useful. Stick a pin in that, we will come back to it some day.

If only I could be that way about, say, getting published, or getting an agent.

Anyhow, Strike Three was when I kept dying with apparently no cause. Turns out I had radiation sickness. But the game never told me that. I just died.

Fuck THAT noise. So I uninstalled it, and tried another random bundle acquisition, a game called Sniper : Art of Victory.

I have two more games in the series on Steam but not the latest one.

And despite the terrible, terrible reviews of the game (a 36 on Metacritic) , I am enjoying it. I have always enjoyed being the sniper in games despite my utter lack of natural ability in the area, and this game makes being a sniper easy enough for me without making it a total softball.

Due to said lack of natural talent, I die a lot. Like I have said before, the fundamental problem with me and stealth/sniping is my lack of environmental awareness.

I just don’t take in enough my my environment – even in video games – to do the sort of predicting and planning and precision needed for that kind of thing.

It’s like I have the heart of a sniper but a skillset more in tune with kicking the door down and blasting every motherfucker in the room.

Le sigh. Oh well, I have enough motivation to keep trying despite constant failure, and that’s more important than natural ability.

One thing that pisses me off about the game is that you can’t possibly get the drop on the enemy because the enemy is the computer and therefore the enemy soldiers have reflexes that are infinitely fast.

Well, maybe not infinitely. But way faster than the 0.08 seconds that it takes nerve impulses to make it to the brain, anyhow.

Oh well, it’s still a lot of fun. You can save any time you want, which takes a lot of the sting out of dying a lot.

I just save the game every time I successfully snipe.

Anyhow, that’s the latest and greatest from the world of the thing that occupies the slot where my life should be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.