My situation re : diabetes just struck me as ironic in a way I will now explain.

Basically, I have type II diabetes because of my obesity. The usual cure for obesity is to eat less. But I can’t do that.

If I eat less than usual, I run a strong risk of ending up with low blood sugar, a situation that is both incredibly unpleasant (I feel like I am dying) and potentially fatal (because I am, sorta kinda).

That means that I, fat as a house, can’t just go on a diet. I would have to consult with my GP and possibly a specialist as well (like a dietician or a nephrologist) before making any large change to my diet, plus or minus.

And that’s mentally weird for a fat dude like me. Society screams at us to lose weight by eating less and for me, it’s just not an option.

Or rather, it IS an option, but a complicated one with too many steps for my depression to handle most of the time.

There’s that ol’ executive dysfunction again. Stringing together a series of actions to achieve a result is basically what your executive function is for, and when that gets overloaded and bogged down by depression, that series of steps had better be short and easy or we just can’t.

No reason why. We just…. can’t. Okay?

I have written in this space (a long time ago) before about how depression screws with how we perceive tasks, making them seem impossibly difficult and intimidating in order to serve depression’s agenda of dissuading you from ever doing anything that might free you from its grip.

And that’s most things.

Well I think I get now that the way it does this is that it hacks your executive function to make all tasks feel like you have to take them on all at once.

Every task is therefore as “heavy” as all of its steps taken on in one go.

One might visualize this as trying to carry a heavy load up a flight of stairs all at once.

Depression pulls this con so well that it never occurs to the depressive that they could simply divide the load into managable bits and shift the load that way.

And that;s part of depression’s evil spell as well. Keeping you from thinking certain thoughts that might threaten it. Then some outside person comes along and points out the option that is super obvious to mentally healthy people, and the depression has to move fast to keep you from doing said option.

Unfortunately, depression has a big deep bag of tricks to achieve that goal. It can distract you into objecting to the tone in which the suggestion was made and forgetting all about the actual substance of it.

Similarly, it can make you mad about how humiliating it can be to have a super obvious thing you missed pointed our, and distract you that way.

Or it might say to you, “what a great idea! We’ll get right on it! Right after we… ” and then suggesting something that will be mentally engrossing enough to give you plausible deniability when you “forget” the suggestion later.

Or it might dispense with the formalities and just flood your mind with fear and uncertainty that you can only escape by blanking the new, threatening idea out of your mind completely, and ASAP.

Thus, depression makes us work very hard to stay sick.

Obviously, I am one of these people who misses things like only having to do one small part of a large task at a time. My mind strongly resists ever looking at things that way. I can see how illogical and self-defeating such all-or-nothjing thinking can be, but that does not automatically let me escape it.

Sometimes, bad tools are the only tools you have.

I mean, I went through the core program at Richmond Hospital Psychiatric Outpatients and had the whole “make a realistic plan of action then execute it” drilled into me over and over five mornings a month for like a year, and it didn’t make a bit of difference.

And it’s not like I disagreed. That certainly sounded like the sort of thing I should be doing. I admired how it specifically targeted executive function in a way that sounded like it would work to circumvent one’s doubts about one’s own effectiveness.

But I never really applied it to myself. Instead, when asked about it in group therapy, I just lied about it.

Lying was easier. So I lied. And eventually, they stopped asking.

People always give up on me eventually, and are almost never willing to ask me the tough questions that would actually help me.

But I don’t blame them. I have an effect on people that disarms and distracts them and makes them not want to upset me because I broadcast my emotions so well.

My mother is the same. It made all us kids eager to do whatever it takes to avoid upsetting her. We are all her guardians and have been for as long as I can remember.

I think people might feel the same way about me. I don’t like to imagine putting my loved ones through all of that, but I don’t think I really have a choice.

None of us can change who we really are.

I think this projecting empathy is also the major factor in why I can be somewhat tiring to be around. Being my audience can wear people out, even if they are loving it.

And so, some people start avoiding me. They don’t want to be emotionally evoked by me any more.

I both give and take a lot from people. Especially when I am “on”.

At least I am fully aware of this truth about me now. I can start to look for signs that I am being “much too much” for people and ease off a bit.

I wonder if Robin Williams had to go through the same thing?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Waited too long to make the reservation for FRED.

White Spot is way more busy than ABC ever was, it seems. I just tried to make a reservation for our usual 6 pm meeting time and the manager told me they were booked solid until 7:45 pm.

Well shit. Dunno what is going ot happe as a result but it will not be pretty. Mostly likely is that me and the other six people coming will show up, find the place is super busy, and end up waiting aroud for hours waiting for a table big enough to open up.

That does not sound fun.

Should we wish to FRED there again, I will know to make the reservation way earlier.

But that doesn’t solve the problem at hand, and I honestly have no idea what will. I suppose I could try to find someplace else but then I would have to contact everyone and tell them about it, and that assumes everywhere else isn’t also booked solid.

I will try to work up the energy and nerve to do that. I don’t have a lot of choice.

But this negative event ahead, where I have to face my friends and my failure at the same time, makes me want to hide from the world forever and just leave the whole thing to crash and burn without me.

Luckily, I am too responsible a human being to do that. I will have to muddle through somehow. It will not be easy, but the ball is in my court and only I can fix this.

Or see that it gets fixed.

---

OK, got things somewhat sorted. Moved FRED to the White Spot at Richmond Center. Luckily, they could accomodate us.

Makes sense. It’s way bigger than the one at Ackroyd. I just default to the one at Ackroyd because I like it there.

Now to get the word out. I have Facebook messaged everyone involved, but I don’t know if they will check their Facebook between now and the time they leave for FREDm and so I will have to get Joe to phone them for me.

I tried to phone Felicity but a fax machine picked up instead of a person. Weird.

I have to get Joe to do it for me because I am operating on the outside edge of my emotional coping resources as is. Adding the social anxiety provoking task of making phone calls to it would be far too much for me to bear.

God I hate being so weak.

Nevertheless, I am pleased with myself for hitting the ground runnning and getting shit done without a long period of dithering and denial.

I can be remarkably swift and competent when I need to be. I should remember that.

Now I just have to deal with the usual feeling like total crap when I wake up. I am seriously rethinking my decision to go back on the sleepy pills.

Turns out that when the pills are keeping my asleep, they also leave me to the mercies of my fucking sleep apnea.

Speaking of which, I need more sleep. I will be back at around 4 pm.

---

Woke up early – at arond 3:30 pm. Oh well, guess that means I didn’t need as much sleep as I thought I did.

So it goes.

All has been done that can be done re : correcting my error. Should be no big deal now, I still feel irrationally bad about the whole thing but at least I was able to fix it.

Right now, my depression is once more trying to convince me that I am too ill to go do the thing. But fuck that. If I can walk unassisted, I will go.

I am tired of missing things and I am especially tired of the nagging logistcal aftereffects of not being able to shop like I normally do.

Right now, I feel quite bad. Headache, nausea, dizziness, the feeling like I have been squished flat and I am slowly and panifully reinflating, the usual host of symptoms.

Toried to play some Middle Earth : Shadow of War. But I had forgotten that I am currently stuck on a very difficult stealth mission, and that is not the sorrt of thing I am good at even when I am alert and awake.

As I am right now, forget about it.

I love the game and its predecessor, but as you patient readers know, I am terrible at stealth. It’s a consequence of my overall lack of situational awareness. In order to be good at stealth, you have to take in every detail of your environment so you can know where to go and not be seen, and so on.

I usually barely notice what is right in front of me, even in video games. That’s no big deal in non-stealth games (which are a vanishing breed), because when all I need to do is fight, I do great.

I’m good at the fighting. The sneaking, not so much,.

For most of the game, that’s been no big dea..After learning the hard way to at least travel without having to fight every damn orc in the game, I could at least get from point A to point B relatively unmolested. And if I did get detected, I fought my way through the assembled hordes and/or escape them via climbing and running.

But this mission specifically requires that I not be detected. If I am detected, I lose. And I am not used to that.

And of course, it takesplace inan area jam packed with fucking Orcs,. So it’s not only a stealth test, it’s an advanced stealth test.

Makes me wish I had the classic One Ring so I could just turn invisible. Sure, it would attract the Wring Wraiths, aka the Nazgul, but they are no big deal.

Killed six of them just to get this far.

I am honestly tempted to look up a cheat that would get me past this bit. But no, my stubborn pride won’t allow it.

Not yet, anyhow.

It’s just a fucking vieo game.

Repeat until believed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, my depression pulled a con job on me today and I fell for it hard, and that pisses me off something fierce.

Here’s the sitch : today is Joe’s birthday. He turned 50 today. Whoa. And the plan was to meet up with his family at White Spot at 6 pm so we could all celebrate together.

And I was looking forward to this. I love his family – they are the people nice enough to invite me over for Christmas dinner every year and I always have a lovely time because they are great people and great conversationalists.

That’s a very long word.

But I woke up feeling terrible, like usual, and in hindsight, I think my depression and/or social anxiety seized that feeling and used it to convince me that I was far too sick to go out and eat today.

So I told Joe I couldn’t go…. and immediately felt a million times better. It was a con job from beginning to end. I wasn’t really too sick to do, my issues just used that to twist my arm and convince me I was sick.

At that point, I theoretically could have said “Actually, no, I feel better now, I will go. ” But I do not have that kind of social agility. The fact that it would have embarrassed me a lot to suddenly pivot like that was more than enough to keep me from doing it.

One definition of social anxiety is “a paralyzing fear of awkwardness”.

So here I sit, in the same bad situation I have been in so many times before : knowing that my friends are all off having fun without me and I am stuck here all alone basically because I suck.

That’s how it feels, anyhow. I feel pretty depressed right now. Not in a self-endangering way, but still pretty bummed out.

I know that I should not blame myself for this. And I definitely need to ignore the voices in my head telling me that I have “failed” Joe and now he thinks I don’t love him or something like that.

I am sure he’s fine. I am sure he missed me but he knows I have health issues that I cannot always control I am sure he understands and would never hold my infirmities against me at all.

That’s what my mind knows, and it;s doing its best to talk my heart into believing it.

So right now, I am just kinda waiting for the crazy emotions to drain away and be processed without my having to accept what they are saying as true.

You’re shut out, Crazy Thoughts. Might as well leave, you’re not getting in.

OTherwise, meh. Getting tired of playing video games all day. Reached the part in my cycle when I can say to myself, “There has to be more to life than this!” and mean it.

That means wrestling directly with my addiction. Addictions always want you all to themselves and view everything else you could be doing with the jaunduied eye for a jealous, bitter lover who loathes all rivals.

Basically, addictions are Yoko Ono.

To hear my Yoko tell it, there is nothing in this life for me but playing video games all day becaiuse when I am playing a video game, I am safe in its arms and not scared or anxious or depressed or anything else.

My mind is too full to let in any bad thoughts.

And when I try to imagine skipping the games in favor of something productive that might actually improve my life and make me qa more fulfilled human being, my addiction is there dutifully supplying the feeling of dread and catastophe that is supposed to convince me that would be a terrible, terrible idea.

But I am growin wise to that bullshit. The real result of not maximizing my video game playing time is my feeling better about life, and that, of course, is seen as the threat it is to my depression etc.

I have been at the bottom of this deep dark hole for a long time now. Life is passing me by while I play Middle Earth : Shadow of War and Slay the Spire all day.

What I want is to get back to where I was when I had just left VFS and was full of energy and ambition and determined to conquer UpWork and become a top earning freelance as a bridge to something more permanent.

I almost can’t relate to the person I was back then any more. He seems like someone who was far more alive and connected with reality than I will ever be again.

I like him. He was cool. I miss being him.

Right now, my strategy for dealing with the crazy thoughts is to not resist them but to let them play themselves out…. but in their own part of the mind, where I can feel them but they can’t take over my mind.

That way, they get felt and thus do not accumulate, but I don’t have to let them have their way with me and make me feel like I am a horrible person.

Because I am not a horrible person, I am a great guy. With issues.

Sooooo many issues. I have more issues than National Geographic.

Because it’s a magazine that has been around for a long time. And therefore that are a great many issues of it.

Ask your parents if you still don’t understand. \

Anyhow, the gist of it is that I am carefully nurturing the slow accumulation of boredom and discontent with my video game based life, and I am hoping that I will so have enough to be able to make some changes in my life.

Because my life right now sucks in terms of making me a happy naked ape. I will fight the fog in my head and wake myself up even though it means abandoning the fog’s cold anesthetic comfort for a world full of pain, fear, and loss.

Wake up. Time to live.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Expressed a lot of my deep negatives in therapy today. But I don’t feel like talking about that just yet.

Instead, I am going to share some of my obscure silliness and give you some translingual puns to decode.

A translingual pun, as you might have guessed from the name, is one that spans languages. Mine tend to be names that seem like normal names but actually mean something in French.

What can I say, I am the sort of guy who not only reads food packages but adds the words to his vocab.

I then attach their “job”, which refers to the pun, and boom, you have a joke credit.

Here’s an example that I just invented tonight :

Desalination Expert : Zelda Maher

Looks totally normal, right? The trick is that “Zelda Maher” sounds like “sel de mer”, which is French for “sea salt”.

Sea salt? Desalination? See, it makes sense once you know the trick of it.

Here’s another one I am proud of :

Professional Snackologists : Burt al-Rasheed and May Sue Flay.

The first is not quite top shelf because al-Rasheed is probably not a real name, and even if it is, I had to insert an L to the orignal phrase to make it look more “name-y”.

But the second one is absolutely flawless and I am so pleased with myself for having come up with such a gem.

I will give you a little more time to guess them before I reveal the meanings.

Give up? Of course you do. I am surprised you read this far. Thank you.

Burt al-Rasheed = buerre d’arachides, also known as peanut butter.

And May Sue Flaw = mais souffle, known at home as popcorn.

Those two things are probably half my diet by weight.

Or how about my friend who is always full of great ideas, Bonny Day?

Bonnie Day = bonne idee, French for “good idea”.

Or if we really stretch it, there is my pal Al Awetta, who collects feathers as a hobby and has arranged his favorites into quite the jaunty plume array.

Only at this moment does it occur to me that I don’t know how to spell the original French version, so how do I look it up?

That one is marked as being Felicity’s. So I am not the only translingual punster.

Um, I will leave that one as an exercise for the eager student.

Then there’s my pal Moe Juiced, who always knows the perfect way to express things.

Moe Juiced : mot juste, a French phrase that we use in Englist to mean “the right word”.

Well, some of us do, anyhow.

Felicity and I came up with a whole bunch of these punny credits at one point. These ones are not translingual and some of them are not exactly A+, but I like them,

Like my lady friend who is a retired church leader, Pastor Prime?

Pastor Prime = Past her prime. Get it?

Some of them require no aid to interpret. Like my pal, ski instructor Dan Druff.

Great guy, but a total flake.

Or my roadie friend, Marshall Stack.

That’s what roadies call a stack of Marshall speakers like the kind they that they use in professional rock concerts that wanna be LOUD.

/And there is my sex worker friend, Sue Pine, who does her best work lying down.

I don’t really have to explain that one, do I? Sue Pine, Supine. Got it?

And I could go on and on. So I will!

OK, maybe not. I feel like I have imposed upon your good graces for long enough.

Makes a nice change from the usual depressive stuff, doesn’t it?

And now, back to the usual depressive stuff,

---

Therapy went well today, I think. Doctor Costin mostly let me vent.

It helped…. if that’s the right word… that I was feeling quite depressed when I walked in the door. Dunno why, but right at that moment, my saddest and most depressed emotions were right at the surface, waiting to be vented.

Perhaps my Deep Code has finally realized that therapy is a great place to dump negative emotions and brought them to the surface for just that purpose.

That would be nice.

So I talked about feeling cold and alone and isolated even when I am around other people, and how badly I wanted to be part of the warm, living, active world instead of a cipher who plays video games all day and is a burden to all, from the provincial government down to my roomies.

There is so much I could do if I wasn’t all tangled up and frozen inside. I am a man of enormous capacities that could contribute so much to the world if I could only get my mental health issues straightened out.

At least I am healthy enough to view that as a tragedy now, and not some kind of indictment against my worth as a human being.

In fact, now that I am thinking about it, there is a certain irony to the thought, “I am such a loser for squandering all my amazing abilities”.

Non-crazy people would think having amazing abilities meant you were not a loser.

Must be nice to be able to be that sensible and self-supporting.

I also talked with Doc Costin about my feeling that healthy people must have some force within them that pushed back against negative thoughts and keeps their mind balanced and relatively happy.

I don’t have that force. Not yet, at least. Now that I am cognizant of the lack, perhaps I can start building one.

it won’t be as good as the ones good parenting and positive religion instills, but at least it will be all mine.

Some of us have to invent our own religion.

And I talked about how my position on innocence has evolved from “innocence is just another word for ignorance” to “what we call innocence is an important protection for a developing mind that keeps it from being exposed to more than it can handle. ”

I don’t have that, either. It was forever shattered by a stranger’s cock when I was 4.

Not sure that is something you can ever get back.

But I guess I can look around for an acceptable substitute.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ypou know, there are people who fall asleep the minute their head hits the pillow and wakes up in the morning feeling refreshed, energized, and renewed.

And I hate those people;.

As you might have guessed, I feel that way right now because I just woke up feeling like used crap and I am feeling bitter and resentful about it.

Why should some people get to have wonderful magical sleep and I am stuck taking forever to fall asleep and then waking up feeling dizzy and disoriented and misterable.

Something must have gone wrong in my very early childhood. Something that screwed up the phase where I was supposed to learn how to get to sleep on my own, and so for the rest of my life, it takes me forever.

And then, due to my fucking sleep apnea, I get my ass kicked when I finally get there.

It’s like getting mugged in Oz.

Health news uodate!

Went to Doctor Chao, my GP, yesterday. As I suspected, my long term blood sugars, as measured by my hemoglobin a1c, was atrocious.

As in, mine was 13, and normal is 7.

So clearly I got to straighten up and fly right.

He was so cool. Cooler than cool.

Luckily, I might be getting some help in that direction. Doctor Chao was kind enough to put in a special request for the province to buy me a Onetouch Freestyle Libre.

Also known as “the blood sugar reader that doesn’t required blood and therefore does not require me to poke holes in my fingers. ”

So,. fingers crossed on that. With that powerful device at my command, I would become a model diabetic, as oppose to now, where I more or less suck at it.

A D+ student at best.

I mean, I do okay. I take my pills and avoid the sweet stuff. But I don’t test and I don’t take my insulin and hence my a1c is through the roof and that means my diabetes is doing all kinds of damage all through my body and that shit’s got to stop, y’all.

With the Libre, I will not only be able to get a reading on my blood sugar whever I like without having to make myself bleed for the machine, that thing takes a reading every like three seconds and relays that info to the app, and that means it can provide me with something very, very valuable to me..

DATA. Sweet, wonderful data! I will be able to see exactly how my blood sugar reacts after I eat one of my typical meals and adjust my insulin accordingly.

And I will find that extremely reassuring. Information like that will make me feel a lot better because I will have the info I need to feel in control.

So fingers crossed indeed.

He also put me on a blood pressure medication called Ramipril, and I am not sure I need it. I think the higher than normal blood pressure reads from the last times I was in his office were due to dehydration, not genuine high blood pressure.

But doctor knows best, of course.

Time for the split.

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That line represents eight hours of time!

Brought to you by the miracle of typography.

Been thinking about change, especially as it pertains to aging, tonight.

As we age, we gain insight, foresight, and wisdom, but we lose the mental flexibility and mobility to adapt to change. Thus, the older we get, the more we want things to stay the same for a while. This is the natural pogression of the human mind, to go from flexible to inflexible over time.

At the ripe old age of almost 46, I feel like I am at the point of equilibrium between flexible and inflexible right now. I can’t really keep up with the pace of change any more – hence my still being on Facebook and nothing else – but I am not to the point where I have to shut out and oppose everything new because I can’t adapt any more.

Luckily,I have known this was coming ever since I was in high school. Back then, I reasoned that this loss of flexibility must be the reason people got more conservative and reactionary as they got older, and I had no illusions about somehow being immune to this effect myself.

But having seen this coming, I have had a lot of time to think about how I would deal with it, and it requires nothing more than the razor-sharp skepticism and reasoning skills I have always used.

The key is to understand that it is I who have changed, not the world. It’s not speeding up, I’m slowing down. Things are no more and no less complicated than they were when I was a kid, I am just ill suited to keeping up.

I learned that the hard way when I took that ill-fated Linguistics course at Kwantlen.

Because it’s me who is slowing down, it is illogical and unreasonable for me to demand that the whole world slow down to my speed.

It is the height of selfishness and shortsightedness to expect the world to change just so you don’t have to.

So I will adapt to what I can adapt to still, and ignore the rest without feeling the need to declare the whizzing whirling world of today to be somehow defective.

And when I cannot adapt, I will retreat imto my cultural bunker which is filled with things I understand and enjoy and leave the rest of the world to go on its merry way without me trying to gum up the works.

So all I truly ask of the world is that it leave me alone in my little island of soothing familiarity along with my temporal contemporaries and let us slip silently over the cultural horizon in peace.

And in my life, the world has generally been pretty cool about that kind of thing.

Were that everyone was so self-aware and honest.

I will talk to you nice people agan tomorrow.

My god yes, lock these men up forever for having sex with some animals rather than doing something normal like killing them, eating them, wearing their skins, wearing their fur, experimenting on them, forcing them to labour for us, riding them, surgically altering them, including removing their sexuality entirely, branding them, forcing them to be our pets, shaving them enslaving them, or taking them to the vet to be euthanized because we’re bored with them. 

You know. Normal stuff like that.

Me, on facebook, being awesome

I wrote that on Facebook earlier today, and as you may be able to tell, I am insanely proud of it.

I have never made that particular point nearly that well. I feel like I leveled up as a writer there. I really nailed it.

Obviously, it was written in response to a news story about bestiality. A bunch of dudes face 41 years in prison for the terrible crime of fucking their farm animals.

Something which, I must add, the animal ,might well enjoy and certainly does not mind as much as a human would.

This is normally when people bring up consent and the blatantly illogical idea that sex with animals is wrong because they can’t consent.

Since when do we give a shit about an animal’s consent? They sure as fuck don’t consent to all the stuff I listed above. We don’t even seek their consent to be out pets and thus subject to our whims.

Getting your animal neutered just so they will be easier to deal with and not embarrass us socially with boners and/or humping? Perfectly legal.

Ditto for spaying. Maybe your cat wants kittens, but you don’t, and I don’t see you putting a pen in her paw so she can sign the consent form.

In all ways and from all angles, a law against bestiality makes absolutely no sense and is not logically justifiable in any way.

Unless, of course, people are willing to also ban all those other things we do to animals without their consent, including making them be our pets.

Something tells me not even the most ardent of animal lovers would be willing to go that far. Not even if they are from PETA.

Hmmm. People for the Eroitic Training of Animals. Could work.

So if these laws are logically and morally unsupportable, what is left?

Only taboo. Sheer mindless taboo. That’s all the law is doing when they put those poor men in jail. They are enforcing a taboo as thoughtless and wrong as anti-miscengenation laws or anti-sodomy laws.

The law is a relic of a previous era where we thought it was perfectly fine to criminalize behaviour which harmed nobody and therefore in which the government had no standing and was, quite frankly, none of their goddamned business.

But we have evolved since then. We have accepted that revulsion about something is not a moral argument. People do all kinds of things that someone else might find disgusting all the time, and we rightly mind our own business about it because we know that tolerating others is the price we way for them tolerating us.

Viewed in this light, anti-bestiality laws stick out like a sore thumb as totally out of step with the rest of our enlightened views on individial freedom in general and sexual freedom specifically. We don’t lock people up for what kind of sex they like any more.

Unless it involves animals for some reason.

The only reason these laws persist is that nobody in their right mind would actually stand up in their legislative body and defend bestiality. It would be political suicide of a particularly messy and humiliating sort. They would instantly become a laughingstock and fodder for every late night comedian on Planet Earth.

So those poor men from the story, who did nothing wrong. will spend the rest of their lives in jail simply because nobody has the balls to stand up for them.

Does that sound right to you?

I know a lot of zoophiles They love their pets as much as any other animal lover (or should that be animal’s lover?). In fact, they might love their pets more because they have such a deep and intimate connection with them.

I have dabbled myself. The idea of it was highly erotic to me so I decided to give it a try. Results were mixed at best. The idea of it was hotter to me than the reality of it.

But I am quite open to the idea of giving it another go, this time hopefully with an animal that is used to having sex with humans so that at least one of us knows what they are doing instead of a lot of awkward fumbling about.

Just like sex with people, really.

Nobody is asking anyone to wholeheartedly embrace the zoophiles of the world, although that would be lovely.

I am merely suggesting that we should let people deal with their pets – who are not people and technically their personal property – as they see fit.

And now, all the people who want to howl at me for breaking a taboo by even talking about the issue, let alone being on the “wrong” side of it.

Who am I kidding? I can never get into trouble on purpose. The only people who will read this are my friends and they know how weird I am already.

Still, the lunatic in me wants to do something crazy like post a link to this article on Facebook and see if I could actually reap the whirlwind for once.

I know that I would be willing to defend this position against any and all comers. My spirit is strong. my belief unshakeable, and my logic unassailable.

And I, personally, would find it great fun to meet the blunt instrument of public outrage with the laser sharp edge of my amazing mind.

And if people are mad at first, just wait till they start being convinced.

They’ll flip their wigs three times sideways at me.

And so help me God, that sounds really, really good to me right now.

So who knows. I might just do it.

After all, I am certifiably insane and insane people do crazy shit all the time.

I think it’s time I start to really enjoy that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Discovered this song recently, and now it seems to be popping up everywhere.

It was totally a case of my suddenly remembering the first part of the chorus, looking up the song on Youtube, deciding I really liked it, and grabbing it.

All perfectly spontaneous. I hadn’t heard the song since it was on the radio way back when. And I hadn’t given the song much thought since then.

And yet, ever since I downloaded it, I keep stumbling across it. It will be on the radio when I am in Joe’s car, or in the background of some random Youtube clip, or someone will refer to it on Facebook.

And it can’t be the “once your friend buys a white car you see white cars everywhere” effect. It’s far too specific a phenomenon for that.

So once again, I appear to have tuned into the zeitgeist without even knowing it. It was time for this song to emerge from people’s memories, and so it did.

And I was part of that. For once in my life, I was surfing the same wave as other people.

And that brings me back to that thing I was talking about in this space a while ago : how is it that socially isolated dreamers like myself can create art that powerfully resonates with people when we barely seem to be on the same planet?

Where are we going when we go gathering wool by moonlight?

Perhaps the isolation and the tuning in are related. Perhaps one thing about a creative dreamer like myself is that we want to listen to that inner voice so badly that we distance ourselves from others and their emotional noise so we can hear it clearly.

That’s a vast oversimplification, of course, but I think I am on the right track. There are a lot of reasons for us sensitive artistic types to stay far from the madding crowd.

All that madding, for one.

The line from the song I like most is :

It’s hard to say I’d rather stay awake when I’m asleep
Because my dreams are bursting at the seams

The moment I heard those words, I identified with them. My dreams are always bursting at the seams. Sometimes it seems like I have so many dreams stuffed in there that I could sleep for a thousand years and not catch up.

On the prosaic level, what I am talking about is my backlog of REM sleep. Presumably, somewhere in my mind is the vault where I keep all those medium term memories that I have never gotten around to processing because my sleep is so crappy.

Makes me wish I could just flush them out of my mind and start over.

But that’s the old, limited, entirely too serious way of thinking. I am trying to learn to not just use my more poetic and mystical side but to embrace it.

And on that level, I am full of words unsaid, dreams undreamt, and thoughts so grand and amazing that the world would gasp at their sheer brilliance if they could only escape my head and shine for them.

I’m working on it.

Lately i have felt that the visionsary state of mind, otherwise known as the waking dream or transcendent consciousness or whatever, is very close to the surface of my mind and I don’t know what to make of that.

IIt’s hard to convey exactly what I am talking about. Maybe you have to be a dreamer yourself to get it, I don’t know.

But have always indentified with prophets, seers, soothsayers,and so on. There are times when my imagination is so strong that it seems realer than reality in the same way that dreams do sometimes.

I don’t actually hallucinate, but I do enter a mindset where the inner voice drowns out outer reality on an emotional level.

I suppose that’s what makes me a highly imaginative dreamer and not an outright psychotic. I can still tell the difference, and the dreams never jump the barrier between my imagination and my active consciousness and get confused with reality.

At times like these, however, I feel like that barrier is mighty thin. I feel so hot that my mind feels like it’s on fire and I am sure that’s not simply a matter of air temperature.

It feels like if I try to imagine something too hard, I will faint and go on some kind of wild hallucinatory dream trip. Wake up later covered in sweat, dazed and drained and with strange symbols floating in my mind and a desperate urge to enlighten humanity and tell them our space brothers are on their way to save us all.

Wouldn’t that be nice.

Thsi state of mind is somewhat stressing my ability to cling tenaciously to reality. Perhaps part of why I became such a hardcore rational materialist is a need to keep my mind from floating away into the sky and never coming down to reality again.

Like I have said here before, that’s one of my worst nightmares. To have my ties to the real world finally snap from all the strain of keeping my enormous zeppelin of a mind from tearing loose of its moorings and getting lost forever in my own mind.

The prospect terrifies me. I have no illusions about what happens when you leave reality behind. I would not end up in a cotton candy fairyland full of unicorns and rainbows and happiness.

I would end up in my own personal hell. At least part of the time. I keep my demons in the shadowy corners and crevices of my mind and if I lost my window on reality, it would be just me and them, alone in the dark.

I wouldn’t stand a chance.

It’s not all bad, though, I am positive that my overstuffed dream vault is the power source for my ability to “see” further and deeper than others, and it is also the wellspring of my creativity.

I might be healthier if I truly got caught up on sleep.

But life would be a lot more boring.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been contemplating my lopsided mind today.

So much put into the cold circuit of logic, reason, and limitations, and so little put into the hot circuit of realtime action, intuition, and transcending limitations.

It makes me feel like someone who has been working out really hard, but only on one side of their body. So one side is all ripped and cut and the other is so puny and weak as to practically be vestigial.

Pretty sure that could kill you.

So the forest from the title is the vast dark jungle that exists outside the bright shining circle of light cast by my massive mentations,.

The light is so bright and so clear that it is easy to totally forget about the much, much larger worlds outside that one bright circle.

After all, when you are in bright light, you can’t see anything that’s in the dark. It might was well be the end of the universe.

But I am not one who can accept lsuch mental limitions. If there is more out there to know, I must know it.

Even if it means stepping outside the light into that deep dark world out there and trying to find my way around.

The prospect terrifies me because I know that, deep down, none of my usual tools will work out there. I won’t be able to “see” out there in the dark. and I will have no choice but to learn to “see” the world through other senses.

Just like a blind person. When it comes to that place outside my bright circle, I really am quite blind. My faculties for that kind of thing are practically nonexistent.

So not just blind, but feeble too.

And so it scares me. Scares me more than damn near anything else. I don’t know the first thing about following my heart and my emotions.

What if I get lost and can’t find my way back/

Oh emm gee, I just figured out what all those dreams where I keep getting increasingly lost as I am trying to get back to where I was are all about.

Me getting lost in the forest.

But exploring the forest is no longer optional. The answers I seek and the healing I crave are out there in the dark somewhere, and that means I have to go out there and find them if I want to be whole.

So I will be brave, and explore, and find my way by whatever means come to hand, and if I do that for long enough, I will adapt, and that alone would bring much healing.

I could prevaricate and say that I don’t know where to start or that I don’t know how to do it, but that’s a trap set by my depression to protect itself.

Of course I don’t “know” where to start. This is not a “knowing” kind of thing. That’s trying to use the old thinking instead of the new.

The hardest part of this for me will be learning to trust things I can’t verify via reason. To accept that emotional reasoning can valid. That’s it’s okay sometimes to not know where you are or where you are going.

That involves a massive update in my ability to trust the universe. Right now, my mistrust and fear run so deep that I automatically assume that to step outside that bright circle of light means instant doom.

There is only control, and death. That which I cannot control via my massive mentation is so inherently hostile as to be instantly toxic.

And lo and behold, you now know why my life is so tiny. Most things in life will involve at least some intuitive and/or emotion-based thinking and so the inability to accept or understand those things can be quite crippling.

Like autism. But way way weaker.

As I write these words, I am feeling the cold touch of my depression as it slowly dies, as well as a pins and needles of the soul feeling that I hope means parts of me are waking up and coming back to life.

In many way, recovery is resurrection.

I have learned, as patient readers know, that this cold feeling in my chest is a good thing. It means I am birthing my ice. That some of that glacier that sits on my heart has snapped off and is floating over yon horizon, never to be seen again.

Kind of sucks while it is happening. It is not at all a comfortable feeling. Kind of feels like I swallowed an enormous icicle and now have brain freeze.

Nevertheless, I glory in it, because it is the feeling of my liberation.

Where was I? Oh right, at the edge of my forest.

I could probably turn at least some of this exploration of mine into fiction. In a sense,. I already have. When I am writing, I might have the major plot points in my head, but the rest comes to me intuitively.

And as I have grown as a writer, so has my ability to not question why what seems to come next seems to come next.

I am still not very good at it. I still verify everything with reason. I am not yet so bold that I could write straight from my consciousness, like a mystic poet might.

In fact, I have great admiration for people with the guts to stop making sense, if you know what I mean. People willing to present the world with works both bizarre and seemingly nonsensical because to them, the audience does not matter.

What matters is that their intuition says the thing is “right”. It is the bext expression of what the artist was trying to express. It is therefore a thing unto itself.

I can’t do that, not yet. As a poet, I am one heck of a science fiction writer. I can conjure up all kinds of wild notions and outre ideas, but they still have to pass through the vasty halls of logic and reason and the desire to communicate before they can be part of anything I am creating.

Perhaps one of these days, I will write a blog entry freeform style, not worrying about any kind of logic except for dream logic.

Like a David Lynch film.

But until then, I promise to keep doing my best to make sense.

It’s all I know how to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Totally remembering why I stopped taking the sleepy pills right now

Because I am extra tasty crispy fried right now. Got that “squashed flat” feeling, like I got run over by a cartpoon steamroller. I feel strange tingles in strange places. My whole body feels raw and sensitive. I am, of course, pretty dizzy, and it gets worse when I move my head, suggesting it’s an inner ear thing.

I probably have fluid in my ear from allergies.

Even when I take my Reactine Complete, those messed up sinuses of mine find a way to fuck me up.

As I suspected, the antibiotics I have been taking have had little effect on this thing on my right am – let’s call it The Boil. If anything, the damn thing has gotten worse.

I will show it to the doc when I see him Wednesday. Seems to me that gettign rid of this fucking thing will require something topical, like Trump jokes like a cream or salve.

It still looks very “angry”.

The words, they are coming very hard right now.

I wish I was too. Ha ha ha.

It’s very hard to stay focused on the task. My head is extrea floaty and it makes it hard to stay in any one place, mentally speaking.

As it is, I am going to have to do this blog entry in two parts, which I normally would never do on a Sunday.

But I really need to go back to sleep for a while and that will require a break. Right now it’s around 1:30. Hopefully I can complete this half of the entry by 2. Then I will nap for like, two hours, and get up at 4 to do Part 2 of this thing you’re reading.

We’re trying to get to Denny’s earlier than our usual somewhat sluggish 7:30 to 8 p,m so we will have more time to watch stuff after coming back to the apartment.

Which means less time for me to nap.

Hopefully, I will feel somewhat perkier after some more sleep. This whole mental fog bullshit is really becoming a pain in the ass.

And not the fun kind, either.

150 words to go. I can do this. I have to do this. For the crown. For the Queen. FOR FREEEEEEDOM! Guitar solo!

Man do I need that sleep.

Not much to report re : what I have instead of a life. Shadow of War continues to be an excellent game, which is good. I finally got to the free-roaming part and I am loving it. Just wandering around killing orcs ad doing side-quests and having fun.

One thing that impresses me about the game is that you have lost none of your powers from the previous game. They totally did not go the cheap way a lot of games do and have the character lose everything so they can start at the bottom again.

Nope! I can do all the cool shit from the previous game. Fucking A.

Time for me to lapse back into my coma.

---

I feel even worse than before. Probably because I am less numb.

Now I have a massive headache. Alleve took some of the edge off ti but it’s still painful as fuck. I feel a little nauseous and/or heat-sick.

It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes.

I have a lot of trouble concentrating. I am definitely not firing on all cylinders right now. I feel dopey and grump and probably need to see a doc.

Dwarf joke. Ha ha ha.

I really don’t want to be trying to make the words happen right now, but I am running out of time. Like I said above, we are going to try to hit Denny’s earler than usual.

And I really, really don’t want to miss out on Denny’s AGAIN and have to get Joe todo my shopping for me AGAIN. So if at all possible, I am fucking going.

Might not be possible though. We will see how I feel around an hour from now. Perhaps by then I will have escaped this current boiling miasma of pain so I can feel somewhat homo sapiens again.

Italics are fun, aren’t they?

I am hydrating and I have the fan pointed at my head, so I am cooling myself off. That ought to help. Right now I feel stiflingly hot in my own skin.

Probably means my pores are clogged again. The cure for that would be a nice hot bath where I can give every inch of me a good hard exfoliating scrub.

Either that or spend time in a sauna. I think our building has one, but it’s small. So, probably not safe for enormous people with claustrophobia like myself.

That damned claustrophobia keeps tripping me up.

The great thing about a sauna is that it’s dry heat, which means that a) it doesn’t make me feel like I can’t breathe like wet heat does and b) the sweat vaporizes almost instantly, keeping you cool for as long as you keep hydrated.

No peeing in the sauna tho. Go make yellow snow.

I sometimes wonder how much of my background malaise is due to clogged pores. Perhaps if I learned how to clean them utterly with reltatively little effort, I would be a much healthier and even saner person.

As is, I muddle along, feeling too hot most of the time, or worse, feeling too hot on the inside and too cold on the outside.

Or vice versa, I suppose. Think I had that when I had the flu that one time.

See, this is why I want there to be such a thing as a human washing machine. I picture it as being like those sit-down showers they have for old people, except inside it there are water jets that can rotate and change their angle of spray and whatnot.

All thjat would be computer controlled, and intelligent, and all that, And the end result would be a very fresh and clean you and all you had to do was sit there.

That way, I could get very clean whenever I liked. And that would be often.

And I wouldn’t be at the mercy of my own lazy care either.

I am really unfit to be left in charge of myself.

I should call the Adult Services Office and report on myself.

I will get back to you on that.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sleep’s been kicking my ass today. But in a good way.

See, I took my sleeping pill like a smart fox this morning, and it has opened the door wide for me to finally catch up with my sleep debt.

And the interest payments on that debt are killer.

So I have spent most of the last 12 hours asleep. Deeply asleep. The kind of sleep that is like a cross between a fever dream and the visions of a prophet all rolled up into all the fun and excitement of being in a coma.

The kind of sleep that leaves me so messed up when I wake up that I am not sure I would qualify as sentient. A huge part of this massive mind of mine is still offline and working on that sweet sweet REM, so there’s little more I can do but take care of my basic needs (food, toilet, reading) and then go the fuck back to bed.

Luckily, with each subsequent awakening. I get more of my brain’s CPU back as, I assume, the stack of missed REM sleep cycles gets smaller and takes up less room.

So right now, I am operating at about 70 percent capacity. I have more of my brain free than still blocked, but there’s still a considerable lag to my thoughts and it feels like part of my brain is still asleep.

This time, I will not wake the Dreamer. He needs this.

I’ve ordered some Indian food from the same place as last week, Karakoram. That’s a huge compliment coming from me. I normally would never order from the same place two weekends in a row.

Unless I really like their food. Ergo, Karakoram.

This time, however, I am ordering more food so that I don’t feel like I made a huge mistake by paying for delivery when that money could have gone to FOOD.

This time I am getting TWO orders of those amazing samosas plus an order of garlic naan. Take that, The Man!

As of this exact moment, it will be here in 47 minutes. Plenty of time for me to finish blogging and put some pants on.

I suppose I could do the “answer the door nude” thing that I understand is shockingly common. These days, any kind of delivery person ends up seeing a lot of naked people and their naked bits.

Porn must be at least be partly to blame. All those “I hope you wanted EXTRA SAUSAGE” scenarios probably a cumulative effect on the zeigeist.

People have beenmaking enjoyably lewd assumptions about delivery people ever since there have been delivery people. They are, after all, strangers who come to your house on demand, and that automatically puts you in the socially dominant position, and so some people start getting sexy ideas about them.

Hence all the “milkman” jokes of a previous era.

The reality, of course, is that these people are working for a living and have a tight schedule where the more delvieries they make, the more $ they make, and they are highly likely to want to stop for a quickie.

Some do, though, I am sure.

AAAaanyhow, that kind of add behavious is not for me. I don’t want any part of making someone’s evening worse.

Ergo, pants. Pants galore.

And probably a shirt.

In video game news, the big headline is that I bought Shadow of War, the sequel to a game I loved called Shadow of Mordor,

I didn’t even know the game existed until it popped up in a sale by Fanatical. And it was only twenty bucks, which is right in my price range and about a third of what it normally is without a sale.

I did a quick check on Steam and on Metacritic to see what people thought of the game, and in both places it got a high rating, so I pounced.

And then got a shock when it turbned out that the damned thing is 93 gigs in size and took 16 hours to download, PLUS I had to uninstall stuff to make room for it.

Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I have had to do that? Make room on the hard drive then wait 16 hours to play the thing?

At least twenty years!

Then, because of the sort of day I’ve been having, I didn’t end up actually trying it until late afternoon. There would have been no point in trying to play it when I was mentally handicapped by my sleep backlog.

And I probably should have waited longer as I only had the energy to make it through the intro bits to the game proper before having to go lay down again.

It seems pretty awesome so far, tho.

The other recent addition, that Assassin’s Creed Unity game I was talking about yesterday, wilkl have to go on the virtual shelf for now. The two games are too similar and I don’t want to learn two different control schemes and risk getting confused.

Plus, speaking of control, I have found that the game lags on me control-wise. Input and result can be as much as 5 seconds apart. Sometimes I can completely take my hands away for my keyboard and mnouse and my dude just keeps going.

Like he suddenly has his own ideas.

I dunno how to fix that. Probably by lowering my graphics settings, which would be super depressing because its Paris seems so very real now.

Oh well. I would rather have the controls work than have to deal with controls that bad.

I was warned that this was a notoriously bad port of a game to PC.

They were right.

:Luckily, it doesn’t matter because I didn’t pay for this one. Ubisoft gave it away for free for a while in honor of the Notre Dame fire because the game has Notre Dame in it.

I am really looking forward to that, given the game’s level of realism.

And it was big of Ubisoft to give away the game for free.

But I can back-burner it for now while I work on Shadow of War for now. A game in which the controls DO work.

Well, that’s my words. Right now, what I really want to do is stick my head in the fan and go back to sleep.

But I can’t do that until the food arrives.

Food then sleeping! I can hardly wait.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Now where are those pants…