…because I am feeling lazy and self-indulgent.

It happens every year. When the weather start getting warm, my personality switches from frantic and frisky fox to languid and lazy lion, and the very idea of work begins to seem like an absurd obscenity.

So in case you were wonder, yes it IS possible for me to get lazier.

Although, given my entirely sedentary livestyle, the laziness is less a change of habits and more of a different state of mind.

It’s like my laziness changes to a longer wavelength and lower frequency and becomes more of a beach kind of laziness that makes me want to lay on hot sand near the water with the heat acting like a sauna baking the toxins out of my skin and into nice dry air in which it instantly vaprizes to keep me cool.

The proximity to the water and those lovely seaside breezes help a lot too.

Maybe this summer will be the summer when I actually go to Gary Point Park with my blanket and my mp3s and my large quantity of water and find a relatively tourist free stretch of beach and lay down to soak up some rays.

It’s funny – no matter what, I can never think of myself as a tourist. It comes from growing up in a tourist area, I guess. For all of my childhood, tourists were those other people, the ones carrying way too much gear and looking out of place and gawking around at everything. I, on the other hand, was an ever-patient and gentle local who viewed tourists as a lucrative species of idiot who need extra special care.

So I tolerated tourists and helped them when they asked. I figured that was my tiny part in Prince Edward Island’s tourist industry.

But the line was clear : they were tourists I was a local. They were one species and I was another. My becoming one of them seemed as likely as a beaver turning into a cormorant, or a moose becoming a wolf.

And this attitude runs through all Islanders. You only have to visit one of the hot tourism spots on the Island to see the difference. Any Islander in attendance will feel an overpowering compulsion to act like the attraction is no big deal and view it all with a cynical eye and in every nonverbal way possible send the message that they are not a tourist and heaven help you if you treat them like one.

We’re a friendly people but we have our quirks.

I have this attitude too, and the fact that I am thousands of miles from home doesn’t make a whit of difference. I can’t ever think of myself as a tourist. You might get mne to admit to being one if you caught be at the right moments when I am say in Victoria, but other than that, if I am in Canada, I am not a tourist.

I’m a local who hasn’t been here for long, I guess.

And there has to be something deeply bourgoisie about that, even though the means by which I acquired it were distinctly proletariat.

But there is something very middle class about being offended at the very idea of being taken for a normal common person. Like the whole idea of being mistaken for a “mere” tourist has so much inherent privilege and classism buried in it that it could not be more middle class if it drove an oversized vehicle and complained about taxes.

I am not looking forward to summer. It’s very hard on me. I am a fat dude in his mid forties who has a genetic predisposition to heat-stroke, so the deck is pretty mkuch stacked against me enjoying the heat.

And yet, I still love blue skies and sunshine, just like most other humans. I guess that kind of thing is on a different cerebral circuit board than our knowledge of whether or not blue skies and sunshine are actually good for us or not.

There is a reason why the picture most children draw is of blue skies, a yellow sun, and green grass. These things are programmed into us from a time long ago, when we walked the green grasses of the Serengeti as the yellow sun beat down on us from under bright blue African skies.

Like I have said before, every animal must contain within its mind an image of its ideal habitat, and there must be a powerful reinforcement of said habitat by having the animal be more comfortable in one place than another, along with an urge to move to the area of maximum comfort.

I think we humans have this image just like all the rest of the critters. And it shows itself in the places we like to live. We inherent want to be near green grass and trees and water. We want that place to be sunny and bright.

That’s why we think of places like Hawaii as paradise. These places check all the boxes magnificently. Sun, sky, water, grass, trees, and friendly people who at least pretend to lead lives much closer to our hunter gatherer roots than us modern folk.

And we flock to these places because our modern world environments provide so little of that environmental feedback we need. That’s why green spaces in cities are so important. They give us the right signals for us to feel comfortable.

And it’s this habitat impulse that is behind our entire relationship with nature. It explains what people used to get out of spending a few weeks in the country. And what modern day campers and hikers get out of spending time “away from it all”.

Heck, it even explains why we keep lawns. We need to be near grass!

I think if more people understood that we have this drive and that we need to meet its needs in order to be happy monkeys, our urban environments would be far more pleasant and we would overall be much happier people.

And environmentalists would not have such a hard time selling their ideas.

I will leave you tonight with a song that sums it up perfectly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have picked up a pattern in my life and it could be something big.

Incident One : Beavers.

During the short time that I was in the Cubs Scouts (Beaver Level, the lowest), I somehow ended up giving a speech to a group of adults.

That’s all I remember,. I don’t recall how this bizarre thing ended up happening to me. It seemed normal and natural to me at the time.

Put a pin in that, for we will be coming back to it again.

I haven’t the foggiest idea what the hell I had to say. I don’t even remember the topic. The whole thing’s a blur to me and I don’t think it’s entirely due to how young I was at the time it happened.

I think that it was the first time I ever entered into this strange “zone” I get into when I am on stage. Everything else kind of falls away and it’s just me and the audience and a lot of instincts I don’t experience anywhere else.

And by far, the weirdest part of this zone is that I almost never retain any conscious memory of what I did while performing. It’s like it happened in someone else’s dream.

And I think that’s why I have so little memory of it.

But I do remember one thing.

I got a HUGE around of applause. My audience loved me.

And that wouldn’t be the last time that happened.

Incidient 2 : UPEI plus D&D

Again, I do not recall exactly how I ended up in this situation. I know I was hanging out at the UPEI campus and somehow the idea of playing D&D came up and then the next thing I knew, I was volunteering to be the DM for a group of people I did not know.

I had no plans. No campaign. No idea what the fuck I was doing. I improvised the whole thing. And that seemed perfectly normal to me at the time.

Told you we’d come back to that.

And of course, I have no frigging idea what I actually came up with It’s a total blank. I have a very tenuous memory of something to do with a magical top-hatted figure and that’s about it.

But you know what I do remember?

My audience – none of whom knew me – absolutely loved it. In fact, they loved it so much that they gave me a standing ovation at the end.

And again, this all seemed normal and natural to me. I wasn’t expecting a standing O, but it didn’t strike me as a particularly noteworth event.

And that is so weird to me now. Most people can’t do that. I completely improvised an entire evening’s worth of D&D and the audience went crazy for it.

That’s like…. a big deal. One might even say it’s pretty damned impressive. I have to wonder why the hell it didn’t make more of an impression on me.

And I don’t have a workable answer for that. All I can come up with is that I had a very happy-go-lucky, tale things as they come personality back then and while that certainly helped a lot in dealing with college life and its stressors, the downside was that nothing made a very strong impression on me for very long.

I just kepts rolling on, like a river, no matter what.

One more major incident :

Incident 3 : Medical History

At some point in the early 2000’s, my GP at the time, Doctor Robinson, told me about a teaching event at which I could volunteer. It was an event to teach medical students and fresh interns how to take someone’s medical history.

And that’s a super important skill. The better you are at it, the better the information you base your diagnosis upon will be, and ergo the better your results will be.

Yes, medical nerds, you will have to develop people skills in order to be a good doctor.

Anyhow, there was a small payment involved (small enough to be called an “honorarium”) and that plus curiosity got me to go there.

After having my first bracing experience threading my way through various UBC building to find the medical student one, I showed up and was led to a room with around twenty bright young things waiting to take turns taking my medical history.

And it was a lot of fun. Once more, I went into this “mode” and was charming and engaging and quite thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

And so did they, so much so that when the time was up, they were sad to see me go. Somehow, without even trying, I had made these people love me.

And here’s the kicker : they liked me so much that the next time I see Doctor Robinson, he repeatedly tells me that I made a very strong impression on those people and they would like to have me back.

He mentioned it a few times after that, too. I didn’t know what to say at the time. Have me back for what?

Again, I made a huge impression on an audience and treated it like it was no big thing.

But it was a big thing. And there are other incidents, like times when I have given a presentation at school and got huge applause, and times I was an actor in theater and people loved it, and the times I hosted trivia at VCON, and the list goes on and on.

And looking at it all now, I am beginning to think that maybe writing is not my most important skill. That I have some kind of natural gift for connecting with an audience and making them fall in love with me.

And that seems like the sort of thing that can make someone rich and famous.

How? Standup comedy would seem to be the obvious choice. I’m funny AND I am apparently catnip for audiences, so what else would I do?

Actually, what I want to do is have a life like my hero Quentin Crisp. After writing his hilarious and lovely books, he made his living as a public speaker. All he had to do was show up, amuse the audience with some anecdotes and observations, and then answer questions from the audience.

And that’s the life for me, my friend. It sounds absolutely marvelous to me. It would barely seem like work at all. All in all, it’s like the perfect lifestyle for me.

And it sounds way easier than being a comedian.

So I have a lot to think about now. It might be that I have been pursuing the wrong skill set all these years of trying to be a writer.

Maybe I should be putting myself in front of an audience and doing what comes naturally to me.

Maybe my true calling is public speakling.

It sure sounds a lot easier than writing!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More fun health stuff!

Woke up at around 9:30 am feeling

1. incredibly, achingly hungry
2. my skin is on fire level hot
3. a full to bursting bladder

First, I just got up and peed. I do that a lot, especially lately. If anyone ever figures out a way to pee for a living, I’ll be rich.

Liquid gold indeed.

So I drained the main vein and lay back down and that’s when the hunger pangs hit me. I tried to ignore them but it was soon apparent that this was not an option as the pangs got worse and I was forced to conclude that I was having a Low Blood Sugar Incident.

So I got up and got some food and drink together and sat down in front of my trusty ol computer to eat it and it was not until then that I realize how hot I was.

And not in the sexy way, unless you have a fever fetish.

See, it had taken that long for me to figure it out because I wake up feeling very hot and sweaty quite often, especially in the spring and summer.

So it took me that long to realize it wasn’t going away.

Now, I have to face the fact that I am mostly likely sick again.

And that suuuucks because I very much want to go out to Denny’s for dinner with Le Gang tonight and do my usual shopping afterwards and fix my supply issues, god damn it, at least for the time being.

And that is why I am pondering doing something uncharacteristically selfish and irresponsible just not mentioning my being sick to anyone until after dinner and shopping are safely behind me,

After all, I don’t know for a fact that whatever I have is contagious. Could be something related to my many health issues. Odds are, I could do it and nobody would come to any harm as a result.

But of course I can’t actually do that. My conscience would be eating away at me the whole time and I would eventually blurt the whole thing out and then be really ashamed of myself. So that’s not a real option.

Nice to think about, though. Sigh.

The thing is, I can’t convince myself that I am OK now because I am still, at 2:14 pm, very hot, especially my head. And it doesn’t feel like a fever, exactly. It’s more like an inflammation of the skin.

And that’s not something I can just ignore. That’s not one of my usual symphony of symptoms. That’s a brand new player.

So, le sigh, I am going to have to tell everyone that I am sick AGAIN, just like last Sunday, and that I need Joe to do my shopping AGAIN, just like last Sunday, and I will be stuck at home while my friends have fun AGAIN, just like…. you get the idea.

Time to go tell Joe the bad news and make up a new shopping list.

This really sucking fucks.

---

Welp, here I am all alone in the apartment, wishing I was with my friends, feely lonely and left out and a tiny bit scared.

But I am always a tiny bit scared. It’s my minimum.

At least I have sushi on the way. Ordering in two nights in a row, how very!

It’s just the money I would have spent at Denny’s, anyway.

And of course, I don’t feel as bad now. I have been very slowly cooling off all day. I still feel pretty warm all over but it’s not nearly as bad as it was when last I blogged at you and even then, it was not nearly as bad as it was when I woke up at 9:30 AM.

I still have no idea WTF is going on. Is this an atypical fever? Some kind of allergic reaction to an unknown allergen? Some neurological bullshit from ym diabetes? Am I developing pyrokinetic abilities like the Human Torch?

Yeah, that’s p[retty much how I felt this morning.

Come to think of it, it kind of feels like a sunburn. But an invisible one, which can happen when it comes from certain forms of radiation.

Well then the answer is obvious. I have radiation poisoning.

Just kidding. That’s a horrible way to die. I shouldn’t joke about it.

But what the hell, I am in a crappy mood, and I need a way to vent.

At least I am admitting that I am in a lousy mood. That’s progress. I spent a lot of time denying almost all of my emotions and going around pretending I was some kind of angel that never is cranky or grumpy or even irritated.

Did such a good job of pretending that I even believed it myself. And it was not entirely bullshit. It really was rare for me to be in a bad mood.

As far as anyone knew. Including me. But the same feelings were there in me, I was just so emotionally amputated that I didn’t feel them consciously.

Now, I can at least tell myself that I am in a shitty mood. And, by blogging about it, I can tell you wonderful people as well.

The next step would be admitting it to others in realtime, starting with my therapist.

The problem is that deep down, I am convinced that people only put up with me because I am pleasant and friendly and entertaining and therefore that if I am ever even slightly less fun to be around, they willcome to their senses and realize what a horrible piece of shit I am, and flee screaming forever.

My own personal version of imposter syndrome, I suppose.

And don’t get me wrong. I am not some tortured circus animal forced to perform. I like being charming and silly and funny and deep with people.

But like I have said before, it’s only part of the real me. The facets I deem safe to show the world. What you see is real but it is by no means the full picture.

I like to pretend that is the real me. But it ain’t.

It’s just me shot from my most attractive angle.

I am so damn showbiz.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

If we must. I guess.

Pondered going to 7-11 this afternoon, but did not make it. When I tried to get myself to go I got all confused and conflicted and I had to wrestle with one of my biggest problems when it comes to my recovery.

And that is the problem of motivating myself without judging myself. One side of me said “We should go!” and my overweaning superego said “YES IT IS WHAT WE SHOULD DO. ” and then the first part was like, “Wait, that’s can’t be right, we hate that guy and he’s no to be trusted” and then the whole thing went kablooey and I laid down and took a nap instead.

It’s so damned complicated to be me.

But I am not going to let the whole incident merely dissolve back into the ever bubbling nuclear melting pot that is my mind.

I consider the whole thing a stategic loss and plan to win the next time. Possibly as early as tonight, who knows.

Clearly, my depression won that encounter and it did so by forcing me into such a state of conflict that the only way out was to forget the whole thing.

And that is not acceptable.

What I need to do is keep my mind from adding any kind of pressure or obligation to the process. That way lies failure. The only way for me to win is if I keep everything very positive and light and forget about whether doing it is “good’ for me or what I “ought” to be doing with my time.

Instead, I need to go back to my discoveries about intrinsic versus extrinstic motivations and myself, and concentrate on the fact that I want to go.

If the trip is a result of a natural outpouring of my desires, then I can build up a positive picture in my mind of the little adventure and it will be that picture that tugs me very gently in the direction of 7-11.

In fact, it’s not even a tug like someone is tugging on my hand. More like a magnetic pull that makes it easier and more fun to go with it than to resist its influence.

I can beat this thing if I work at it hard enough. After all, there is a world full of life and wonder outside this dirty ol’ apartment of mine just waiting for me to experience it.

And I know for a fact that every time I take one of these little autonomous trips, I end up feeling much better afterwards. I feel less trapped, more free, healthier, more connected with the world, and it lifts my mood.

So screw you, my Bad Predictor. You dont know what the hell you are talking about. I’d rather listen to my heart for a change.

What the hell, it can’t be worse than listening to you.

---

Got KFC on the way. Yum. I was originally going to get curry. But around twenty minutes ago, the Eleven Herbs and Spices started calling my name, and I just had to respond.

Fuckers didn’t have any 2L of Diet Pepsi for me though. I thought I had found a workaround for at least one part of my supplies issue, but nope.

I made my order online and ten minutes later the manager of the local KFC calls mne and tells me they have no 2L Diet Pepsis, but he can offer me regular Pepsi or 7UP!

I told him I am diabetic, so I can’t drink those. So just forget about it.

Oh well. I guess if I want my caffeine fix I will just have to make that trip to 7-11.

I will think about it. It being dark and increasingly cold out now does kind of put a damper on things.

But the important thing to remember is that whether I go or not, it’s fine. No judgment or internalized punishment is necessary or justified. If I can’t quoite bring myself to do it, that’s fine, there is always next time.

Under no circumstance and on no level is my self-worth on the line.

---

Just watched the first episode of the Jordon Peele reboot of the Twilight zone with J&J.

It was excellent. Totally worthy of Serling’s legacy. It was a classic Twilight Zone type story very well made.

Not sure why Jordan Peele did the whole thing dressing like he was in an ad for scotch, right down to muttonshops, tweed, and a meershaum pipe, but that’s hardly a dealbreaker. Just…. odd.

Like he seriously looked like he just came in for a quick glass of the good stuff in between walking the Hounds of the Baskervilles and chatting with Lord Greystoke.

Quality references, brought to you today by moi.

Waited until 9:10 pm – more than an hour after I ordered it – to call KFC and ask them where my food was.

Turns out, when I talked to the manager earlier and told him to “forget about it, cancel it”, he thought I meant “cancel the entire order”, not “forget about the 2L of Diet Pepsi”.

Because it’s totally logical to assume that if they don’t have the pop I wanted, I no longer need to eat.

Oh well, the food got here aroind 9:30 pm and I am now fed. And man, I knew I was hungry, but even I am surprised at how fast I ate my food.

Four pieces of KFC chicken, cole slaw, a poutine, and can of Diet Pepsi all disappeared like a frickin’ magic trick.

The sad part is I am still a bit hungry. Honestly, I think the uncertainty added to my irritation and the irritation added to my hunger.

By the time my food finally showed up, I was ready to eat the shit out of that chicken.

Not literally, of course. That would be gross.

So all in all, it’s been a day of ups and downs. Like all of life. I can only hope that one day, I will finally get my shit sorted and be able to have the life I want.

Until then, I will just keep blogging my little heart out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has not been fun, ’cause I am sick.

It started when I woke up around 11:30 am and realizes I was brutally hungry. As in, experiencing actual strong pangs of hunger.

Patient readers know that I am no stranger to extreme hunger and that it’s usually caused by my not eating enough and/or missing my meds.

But I had a totally normal breakfast and I was (and am) current on my meds, so that did not explain it this time.

What followed was a very rough half an hour of waiting for lunchtime to roll around. Yes, I am such a creature of habit (you know, like a nun) that even though I was in real pain and distress and possibly also in danger, having lunch half an hour earlier than I usually do was unthinkable to me.

That is really going to bite me in the ass some day, I know it.

But what the hell, I was not thinking straight due to the aforementioned agony.

Noontime finally comes and I make myself a hearty lunch and soon my hunger has been sufficiently silenced for me to notice that I still feel really awful.

Turns out, I was that hungry because my body had been burning through my blood sugar as it fought off whatever sort of infection I have picked up.

Joe is sick too, and we probably have the same thing.

The worst part is the muscle pain. My everything was sore. At first, when my mind was still somewhat fogged, I experienced this pain as a feeling of pressure all over my body, like I was being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste.

But once the fog lifted, I realized that what I was really feeling was the effects of a full body muscle ache like one sometimes gets from what used to be called an “ague” or a “grippe” but is now called “the flu”.

The old timey names are so much more fun.

The good news is that a) the ache has tapered off to a background level as the day has progressed and b) so far it is my only major symptom.

Consider what other horrors the flu can visit upon a person, I am very grateful for that,. I will take achey muscles over anything that causes a lot of fluid to come from orifices any day of the week.

So here is hoping my body is winning the war against this bug and things will not get worse before they get better

Because of Joe and I both being sick, we did not go out to eat with Felicity like we normally would on a Friday night, and that makes this whole flu thing but the latest a of long series of things to fuck with my supply situation.

Not going out means no stopping at 7-11, which means no opportunity to replenish my supplies, which means I am all out of my usual munchies and such.

I am beginning to think that all these random things fucking with my routines (no two alike) is the universe’s way of telling me I need to be more independant.

Were I more mobile and less agoraphobic, when I ran out of stuff I could just go to the nearby 7-11, a mere three blocks away, and take care of the situation myself instead of relying on others.

It would get me out of the apartment and into the fresh air and sunshine of the real world, plus I would get a little exercise while also proving to myself that I am not as incompetent, pathetic, and dependent as I often think I am.

Gee, with a sales pitch like that, who could resist?

Depression, that’s who.

But who knows. Maybe I will feel well enough to do it tomorrow afternoon. I hope so. I deserve to do something healthy for myself for a change.

But everywhere I turn, there’s my damage, holding me back, telling me no, giving me pain and sadness and despair when I try to escape this cage of mine.

I guess I need to learn to do things despite those feelings.

They are most likely bullshit feelings anyway. just more of depression’s bag of tricks designed to make sure it has me to itself forever.

I need to keep reminding myself that depression lies. That the part of me that predicts the results of various potential actions is highly corrupt and rarely if ever accurate and that it only stays in power by preventing me from ever testing its predictions.

After all, if I always believe it when it says something will lead to misery and therefore do not do said thing, I will never know if it was right. Right?

Meanwhile, I continue to be addicted to Slay the Spire. I don’t know why but the game is just plain fun. Especially now that I have discovered its fairly big mod scene, which includes a ton of different character classes to choose from, each with their own unique set of cards and rules resulting in a totally different gameplay experience.

So um, yeah. Probably going to be playing this one for a long long time.

Oh, and finally realized I was in a five week month earlier today. Which bummed me out for a while. But I should be fine assuming my GST check shows up soonishly. That will pay for that fifth week.

The fact that I did not have to shell out for dinner tonight will help too.

But even without that, I would be fine, because I have around $160 saved up on my reloadable visa thanks to getting two $75 checks for two years of taxes recently.

So I am fine, really. Hopefully, I will also get a cheque for the GST payments I missed in the previous fiscal year as well.

That could be as much as $500.

I wonder what the cheapest way to get home to visit the folks in PEI would be?

I miss my family so much and they are so very far away.

Hey look, human emotions.

I am always glad to see them when they show up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Alright, let’s take a crack and this fucking thing again.

Here’s the quick and dirty version : I can’t make peace with my prodigous IQ because I don’t like where that leads.

Namely, it leads to the conclusion that I am vastly superior to most people and that compared to me, most people are children poking about in the dirt.

That is the inevitable unacceptable. That is the conclusion I cannot avoid and cannot accept. That is the irresolvable conflict.

Divide by zero, baby.

I can’t avoid the fact that I am intellectually superior to most of humanity. The evidence is rather overwhelming. Stick me in any form of school and it soon becomes evident. I get high marks without even trying.

And this has been true for my entire life. I mean, I learned to read when I was three and a half. And nobody taught me (except maybe Sesame Street), I figured it out by myself, all at once, like a thunderclap of revelation.

Even I find that hard to fathom, and I am the one who did it.

So blah blah blah, I’m crazy smart, etc. Sorry if my bringing it up so much makes it seem like I am bragging. I am not.

I bring it up so often because I am trying to learn to deal with and accept it.

And I have spoken before about why I can’t accept it. It feels like if I was to accept it, it would pull me away from the rest of humanity and put me high atop a pedestal somewhere, looking down on everybody, way up in the air.

And that thought terrifies me. I don’t want to be on that goddamned pedestal. It’s cold and lonely and there’s not enough air up there.

And yet, I can’t see a middle path. In theory, it should be possible to fully integrate and enjoy my extraordinary intellectual powers without becoming some kind of raving loonie with delusions of grandeur, or worse, an elitist prick, but the option simply is not there for me on an emotional level.

I seem to have the kind of mind that goes to extremes.

I don’t know either, Billy.

And I can feel a darker version of me struggling to get free. Someone who is smug and arrogant and sarcastic and enigmatic who knows he can run rings around most people intellectually and hence views them with mocking disdain when he’s not just toying with them lfor his own entertainment ike a cat toying with a mouse before killing it.

I don’t want to be that guy. And yet, for reasons I don’t know how to explain, I feel like he’s the only next step available to me, so it’s become him or stay stunted.

No wonder I am so goddamned conflicted about the whole thing. I only have one option and it sucks.

And I can’t help thinking that if I were a more normal person, I would have just become that guy as a young adult and gotten over it decades ago.

But I am not a normal person.

I am someone far too aware of the options and the consequences for his own good.

I’mma lay down now. More on this later, maybe.

---

You know, sometimes I pee so much in a given day that it starts to feel like a job.

Like every time my bladder is full, it’s my boss calling me and telling me to stop fucking around and get back to work

“Srry, gotta go, my boss just called and man, does he sound pissed!”

Ba dum tish.

Anyhow, knowing too much for my own good.

I think it’s a matter of the loss of innocence I experienced when I was raped. Amongst many other devastating effectives that the rap had, it opened my eyes to the darkness, evil, and pain of the world and destroyed whatever protective mechanism normally keeps kids from learning things before they are ready for them.

Innocence is as good a name for said mechanism as any.

Then later on, I started consciously trying to figure people out. Before that, I could perceive a lot about other people’s emotions and how radically different what they say and feel can be, but I had never tried to understand them on a conscious level.

I started because I wanted to understand my bullies.

I did it while hiding in this grey box here :

That’s where I would hide from them. Lying there in the foot or so between the bottomn of the inside of the box and the rim, lying in cold water or filthy snow or whatever else the weather put in there. In there, every recess and lunch, every schoo day for many years. Hiding from my fellow students.

It made me feel safe.

Little did I know that this line of inquiry would lead to my learning a whole new level of things I was too young to know. I figured out things about people that they didn’t know about themselves. People’s motivations and drives became crystal clear to me. It was like I could see right through their skulls and into their very souls.

And there’s a lot of things a kid just plain ain’t supposed to see in there.

Even now, that’s a hard thing to say, because the inner child in me haughtily insists that there is no knowledge that could hurt him, rugged little genius that he is.

He doesn’t need to be babied like other kids. He can handle the rough stuff!

And maybe he’s right. I have no direct memory of learnings something I ought not to know. But then again, I wouldn’t, would I?

I lacked the necessary sophistication to even recognize that situation.

But I can say this : learnign all that I ;learned that way can’t have been good to me. There is a reason for innocence and consequences to its fall.

I can’t remember a time that I felt safe.

Maybe I need the ol’ grey box again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Only better. Cause they’re way less scary,

There’s been a fair bit of motion in my video game so-called life so I thought I would take a break from the angst and porn (guess which one’s more fun?) and rap about that thing I have in the spot where a life should have gone.

There are other, meatier, more psychologically fruitful things I could be talking about. But fuck it. I’d rather pretend something in my life has meaning and purpose.

And sometimes, I get well and truly sick of myself and need to do something to get away from my usual fetid swamp full of graveyards and tombs.

First all, we shall talk about the Knights of the Old Republic series.

These are roleplaying games set in the Star Wars universe in the days before the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire. You play someone who eventually becomes a Jedi (in the first game) or starts off as a Jedi (in the second game).

I recently played through the first two games, having gotten them in one of those crazy Fanatic bundles with like 12 games for $4 or something.

Granted, said games are quite old, but I am not fussy. I just want something worth playing. Age matters little to me when it comes to media.

Ain’t nothing but two kinds of art : good and bad. And that’s as true of video games as it is of jazz, French cuisine, or comic books.

The one thing games can’t be is ugly. I am a highly sensitive artistic type and if the graphics are gross I am out of there.

Anyhow. The first game I had beaten before, on the Xbox, and so while it was highly enjoyable it was also somewhat familiar.

I say somewhat, because my initial run was around a dozen years ago, so it’s not like the memories were super sharp. But I had a lot of little flashes of remembrance.

Not so in the second game. As I played it, I realized that I definitely had not finished it when I played it before. In fact, I am fairly certain that I must have lost interest right after I finally had my trusty ship, the Ebon Hawk, and full run of the galaxy, because nothing that happened on any of the planets was even remotely familiar.

And the game is good. It is that rare sequel that successfully exceeds the original. Especially in terms of the writing. The storyline and dialogue in KOTOR 2 are far more in depth, well written, and richly detailed than in KOTOR 1.

The first game’s plot kept me interested.

The second game’s plot had me absolutely riveted to my seat. Especially once you complete the various planetary plotlines.

Plus, the voice acting in the second game is far better than in the first. Not because there was anything wrong with the voice acting in the first but because the voice acting in the second is so damned good.

Of particular note is Sarah Krestelman as Kreia. She is the most pivotal character in the game besides yourself and has the most lines of any of the NPCs. What’s more, there is a lot of layers to the character, as there often is with characters who are elderly, and Kestelman masters every single one of them, and packs each syllable with a level of nuance and conveyance that made the character spellbinding.

The character acts as a dark mentor to your character for most of the game, challenging you spiritual, morally, and mentally, and that takes a lot of skill to convey properly.

I wish I had a dark mentor. Or any mentor, really. Someone to challenge me and stimulate growth. It would make staying interested in life a lot easier.

But they would have to be awfully strong-willed and smart.

On to newer arrivals. After reading some glowing reviews and watching a very interesting trailer, I tried out a game called The Binding of Isaac : Rebirth.

Looks like it’s going to be a dark and twisted descent into utter madness in some kind of horror type game, doesn’t it?

It ain’t. It’s a rather spare and boring roguelike type game with very little in the way of plot and with game mechanics so primitive that they feel like they came from the 90’s.

The game seems to think that gross, bloody, fucked up graphics are a substitute for actual content and all you actually do in the game is run around collecting powerups and shooting things.

I was terribly disappointed in it. So I returned it. Luckily, Steam is super chill about returns these days. They have even extended the maximum time you can play the game and still return it from one hour to two.

And it only took 24 hours for me to get my $ back!

And with said money (and a little more), I bought Slay the Spire.

Here’s the trailer for it :

The reviews for it are glowingly positive and it certainly sounded like my sort of game, so I thought I would give it a shot.

And I was not very impressed at first. The graphics were meh, the CCG-tyle gameplay mechanics seemed way too simple, and overall I was pretty meh about the whole thing.

But I have gotten into it now and I must say I love it. Its charms may not be obvious but it drew me in and hooked me hard and now I am very pleased with my purchase.

Plus, there seems to be a fairly good mod scene for it, so if I get tired of the regular game I can always mess around with it a bit.

Like I said in the bad old days of Skyrim, there’s playing the game, and there’s playing WITH the game.

And they both can be a heck of a lot of fun.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Peeled back another layer of the onion today.

I was pondering things in general, like I do,when I caught a glimpse of something previously unseen.While thinking about my problems in general, I found myself wondering why it was that I couldn’t just settle down and be calm and stable.

And there it was, like a gremlin on the wing of a plane in WWII : the chaotic core of madness that keeps me from having any sort of stability or sanity. The beast that rips apart whatever I try to put together in my mind.

It’s the scared little animal in my mind, crazed with fear and filled with impotent rage, that sees anything that restricts its options as a deadly trap to be attacked and destroy before it kills us.

That’s my primary demon, that psychotic little critter in me. That’s the part of me that is well and truly crazy. That’s the source for all the random urges towards various levels of violence that I have to deal with and suppress on a daily basis. That’s the true power behind my toxic superego’s mad campaign to destroy me.

And it’s the wellspring of all my restlessness. It’s the reason my mind is always searching, always moving, like a hunting shark. It’s what gives me the urge to try to see in all directions at the same time.

It’s the reason why I just keep going. Why I can never just stop and collapse and heal, Maybe even get some goddamned renewal for once in my goddamned life.

Hell, it’s probably a big reason of why I don’t sleep well. How could I, with this foam flecked maniac prowling through mind all the time?

Let’s call it the Blood Weasel.

And it’s the part of me that needs to be talked down and made to feel safe. A frontal assault certainly won’t work. You can’t calm someone down by attacking them.

Not in real life, anyhow.

In fact, I can’t think of a direct way to calm my little critter down at all. It’s certainly not the sort of thing my ‘beat it to death with my brain’ approach to life finds easy. It seems to me like the only approach that might work is something purely emotional, with the heavy instrument of my “brilliant’ intellect well out of sight.

It’s my primary tool in life and yet sometimes it scares the hell out of me. I worry about the damage it could do if I don’t keep it in check. Somehow, it being so big can make me feel quite small.

And I can feel my vastly undernourished id lurking in the background, looking for an excuse to take over and use my mighty machine of a mind to attack the world and force it to give me everything I want no matter who gets hurt.

Even if the person who gets hurt the most is me. Fuck it. There are things far worse than pain and damage, and I live with those things gnawing at my soul 24/7/365.

All those things I have never had : sex, romantic love, a place in society, wealth, status, achievement, the approval of my peers – pretty much the entire hierarchy of needs above the basic survival level – those things are not optional and the lack of them takes deep and personal toll on me all the time.

And only a profoundly and perversely over-intellectual mindset that filters out most input from the body keeps me from being constantly crippled by all the drives and desires that I have denied for so goddamend long.

Well, that and the Blood Weasel won’t let me stop moving. Fucking weasel.

The very thought of trying to untangle that ball of snakes that is my seethingly unfulfilling id intimidates the ever-loving fuck out of me. It’s such a massive problem that it feels like even opening the door a crack to it would destroy me.

Not say it’s true, just saying that’s what it feels like.

I want so much, and with such eye-watering intensity, that I would not know where to start even if someone handed me a million bucks and said “Go fot it!”.

My first thought would be sex. Hot cock on tap, baby. Hire me a brace of sexy male prostitutes and we’d fuck and suck till I was done.

But after that, who knows.

“What kind of guys do I want? I dunno, send me one of everything… ”

My pent up fantasies aside, I suppose all these frustrated urges and instincts are part of what keeps this Blood Weasel (BW) of mind so restless and viscious.

It all seems so vast and hopeless. Intellectually, I know the only way to solve a big problem is by taking it in small bites till you’re done.

But I am too scared to face it. It’s so big and I’m so small and it wants to kill me. I just know it. So all I can do is hide away and hope it goes away.

Even though I know it will never, ever go away and it’s the hiding that’s killing me.

But maybe that’s all bullshit – propaganda my depression puts out to convince me that my problems have no solution so I am better off not even trying.

Maybe the best thing I could possibly do for myself would be to throw open the doors to all my cages and let all my tame beasts free so I can finally find out who I really am without all that chaos and noise in my head.

Maybe even that drooling maniac I have dubbed the Blood Weasel should be unleashed upon the world to find it’s fortune Out There.

But what would it do without me? It wouldn’t know where to go or what to do. IT owld be alone and confused and scared to death out there in the big bad world.

It had better stay here with me after all.

After all, I am the only one that can keep it safe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

I promise not to do more than one of these a week. Two tops.

Oh, and tonight’s entries will be very Rule 34, and so if you have tender and innocent feelings about Family Guy, Dumbo, or really any animated thing ever, and it would wound your soul to see any animated character getting their hump on, then please, for the love of God, do not read any further.

I don’t want anyone getting hurt. So please, skip this one, come back tomorrow, everything will be all dark and broody in a SFW way again and all will be good and right in the world again.

Are they gone? Good. That just leaves us happy little perverts.

Let’s get it on!

First, let’s go to the dogs.

Yes, that is Brian from Family Guy getting seriously railed by Scooby Doo.

Very last chance to split, sensitive types, as it only gets worse from her.

I love how Scoobs is all “Yeah, take it bitch!”. Except it’s Scooby Doo, so it’s more like “Reah, rake it rich!”

I have a slight crush on Brian, which makes this even hotter.

Don’t worry, Bri Bru darling…. it only hurts for a little while then you will be in gay butt sex heaven, I guaranteed it,.

I am so jealous of him.

Now for my favorite gay sex pairing from Family Guy

Brian and his cousin Jasper, who also can talk, drive cars, and own property, and nobody seems to think that’s weird.

Jasper is, technically, a screeching gay stereotype, but I will forgive it because he’s written as a real character and usually comes across as a really great guy.

Besides, that’s just one of the stages of getting acceptence for your minority group. In between overt bigotry and enlightenment lies the “sympathetic stereotype”, who acts exactly like the majority expects his group to act, but does so in a way that makes people see them as real human beings and not just the stereotype.

Besides, Jasper is adorable. I just want to give him a nice long “tummy rub”.

And now, on to Dumbo!

Beats the hell out of Pink Elephants, don’t it kid?

I suppose this could be labeled QC for Questionable Consent, as our lil hero seems to be boozed up, but they both look so darn happy I can’t imagine Dumbo regretting it.

Turns out you can have a lot of fun with your “other trunk”, eh kid?

Imagine that said in a Scatman Crothers voice by the crow.

Makes me wonder how they got to that point. I think the crow just taught our adorable hero how to give himself a trunk job.

Just goes to show that when the student is ready, a teacher appears. One with sage advice, practical assistance, and some Jergens hand cream.

Now we spend a little time with nature.

So yeah. I am into pee. If you are not, um, sorry.

But I am only showing you something that is happening billions of times a day all over the world. Think about it : with all the animals in the world plus all us humans, how many acts of urination and/or defecation are happening right this second?

Then add in all the ejaculation, and it really us a beautiful thing. All that blessed release.

And really, who could object to such an adorable and innocent scene? He doesn’t seem to quite know what is going on, but he never was all that bright.

And while we are violating Disney on multiple levels :

Hey, what’s the point of having slavishly loyal minions if you can’t use them for sex? Not that said minion seems unhappy about the situation. In fact, I bet this is the happiest day of his life.

Unless this kind of thing happens all the time, which is probable. Dukey there doesn’t seem like the sort to let species or gender get in the way when he’s horny.

Ever wonder where rainbows come from?

We all know where the rainbow goes…. we’ve been told it’s a pot of gold!

Well, there’s something golden in there anyhow.

He looks so cute and happy. Like he’s a tiny bit embarrassed but mostly just experiencing relief from his full bladder and the simple pleasure of the act of urination.

Gardez l’haut for anyone down below, though. I choose to believe it falls as a warm, gentle rain, or maybe as a shower of Skittles.

Now for something to BoJack off to :

I bet BoJack has had a lot of gay sex without considering himself gay or even bi because he either did it to advance his career or when he was super drunk and thus had plausible deniability.

I mean, how could he become one of the biggest stars in Hollywoo without being pretty flexible (I know Brad is) about certain boundaries?

With a cock like that, he would be beating us fags off with a stick.

Or just beating us off.

One last pic. Then I will call it a night.

Here is an all time fave of mine :

I think Robin just figured out how to keep Prince John happy : give him what he REALLY wants to suck on.

I mean, just look how happy the old creep is with a cock in his mouth, possibly for the first time ever.

I mean, it’s not like Sir Hiss, a snake, has anything to offer in that respect . Nor do the Sherriff’s two dimwitted deputies, both vultures.

The Sheriff is a wolf (kinda), so he’s got a good sized cock. There are certain hierarchical issues but those can be solved with sufficient threats of bodily harm if word should get out as to what they have been up to.

Anyhow, that’s it for tonight. This wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be. I ran out of words again. And I guess it doesn’t feel naughty or daring any more.

Tomorrow : back to the usual slow motion angst-alanche.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.