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.