Cool title, huh? Very literary.

It came to me when I was thinking about the vast cold mass of frozen and congealed emotion I have to move in order to get anything done in this misbegotten head of mine.

The whole business is a big drain on my personal resources.; It’s like having to dig your driveway out of the snow just to walk across the room. Or like I have hundreds of gallons of cold, sludgy water tied around my waist that nobody can see.

And while I was thinking about that and trying in vain to imagine what it would take to warm all that stufff up so it could thaw and be released, that phrase, “to teach a stone to burn”, popped into my head.

And I instantly knew what the subject line of my next blog entry would be.

Because it really does feel that way. Like in order to get anywhere, I would have to teach the rocks and stones in my soul to burn like dry twigs in order to finally get them out of my mind so I can think.

Yes, I know I use a lot of different images for the same things. Thing is, they’re all true.

Poets don’t always have to be able to explain themselves, do they?

I have been contemplating a somewhat extreme approach to my social anxiety when it comes to super challenging situations like, say, a party where I don’t know anyone.

The idea goes something like this : instead of viewing that party as a sea full of hostile strangers who hate me and are just waiting to hurt me for the temerity of thinking I belonged with people at all,. I would instead think of them as a whole gang of friends I just haven’t met yet.

Kind of like what Men Without Hats say in this song :

It’s not quite as delusional as it sounds. I know that I can be very charming and likeable and charismatic, so if I go in with that attitude, I could very well make it true.

There’d be some rough spots in the beginning as I make a lot of highly valuable mistakes, some no doubt enormous (big personalities don’t make small mistakes), but the important thing is that I would stay in the game long enough to learn.

I find that if I simply embrace the inevitability of massive social blunder, it makes it a lot less scary and I feel like I am ready for it and might even be able to not just recover from it with grace and aplomb, but turn it into a positive by laughing along with every one else at it and thus owning it by refusing to let it get to me.

Played just right, it could actually make me more popular with people. not less.

That’s the kind of magic possible for special wizards like me.

I sometimes imagine myself as a depressed wizard,.

One who only shows his tricks to a few friends and the occasional stranger. And both groups tell him that his skills are astounding and that he should be trying out for the vacant Court Wizard position, or at least travel and help people.

But he always demurs. Says he’s really not that great, and he’s too scared to go out of his tower, let alone try to be a court wizard. Throughout it all, he treats his magical powers as if they are no big deal.

And this causes a certain amount of frustration amongst his friends and fans. They tell him over and over that they would give their dominant arm to have powers like his, and if they did, they would use them to become rich and famous as hell.

And he does not disagree with what they are saying. Nevertheless, he stays in his lonely twisted garret and continues to cast spells both amazing and potent, the kind that could reshape the whole world, and never shows them to anybody who might help him to realize his dream of being a mighty wizard.

Because all the miracles and wonders don’t mean jack shit if you lack the courage to go out there and take on that big bad world out there.

Sound like anyone you know?

Somehow, I have to stop turning away from life.

You can’t get ahead by burying your head in the sand. You can’t get what you want out of reality by refusing to live in it. Those who deny reality lose all power over it.

And I want to get ahead. Not in some status-conscious “success” chasing bullshit way, buit in the only way that has any meaning : getting my life closer to how I want it.

That is my new definition of success. All that matters is whether or not you have the life you want – one that works for you. One that makes you happy, fulfilled, and content.

Under this definition, a person who lives in a shotgun shack in the worst part of town who makes their living by collecting bottles and cans from trash cans might well be hugely successful if that life suits them and makes them happy.

On the other end of the spectrum, someone might have all the wealth, acclaim, respect, and worldly comforts in the world, including a supportive family and the love of a group of good people they call friends, and still be a miserable failure because their life is not making them happy and they are wracked by the pain of needs they don’t even have the spiritual awareness to know they have, let alone how to insure they are met.

So what I want is a life more suited to me. This bullshit life I lead now is crap. Playing video games all day is not enough. I want a job and a husband and a nice home where I can entertain friends and a steady supply of hot, hot sex.

In roughly that order of preference. Sorry, future hubby. but I need gainful employment more than I need you.

And this vast gulf I feel between me and all the things I want?

It’s an illusion. I have everything I need to succeed. Success on my terms is waiting right outside my door.

All I have to do is let it in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For that matter, don’t fold, spindle, or mutilate either.

WTF is with that last one, anyhow. Folding mail and spindling mail (meaning sticking it on a metal spike) are things any office that gets a lot of mail might do, especially back in the old days before mechanical sorting and the like.

But mutiliate? Was there ever a time when it was a common practicle to mutilate mail? Did every large office’s mailroom have a dedicated mail mutilator who had to specifically told to skip this letter?

Old Pro :Whoa there son….. stop right there.
New Hire pauses with an envelope between his teeth, about to bite down on it.
Old Pro : See that warning there? That means this one you do NOT mutilate.
New Hire reluctantly takes the envelope out of his mouth and puts it in his OUT tray atop a pile of horribly mangled mail.
New Hire : That’s too bad. It smelled delicious.

Or was it the mailman who had to be warned not to mutilate the mail?

If so, the implications are staggering.

Anyhow. Back to the point I assume I was going to make.

Oh right. Tonight’s topic is a continuation of yesterday’s thoughts on grit.

Specifically, we will be discussing how to acquire it.

Now the easy, flippant, and unhelpful answer would be to say you acquire it by not giving up on things when you really want to flee.

This is no doubt true as far as it goes. Grit, like many other mental faculties, can probably be compared to a muscle that gets stronger the more you use it, etc.

And that is a perfectly logical and reasonable approach.

But this is not a logical or reasonable problem. The choice to collapse and escape no matter what the consequences is not the product of reason.

It is the product of panic. And panic is the opposite of reason. A panicking person is fully adrenalized and therefore has about the least access to the rational reasoning part of their mind as is possible without a total loss of sentience.

So “just stop doing that” is not a helpful response. You might as well be telling an alcoholic to “just stop drinking”.

Wow, problem solved, huh? Good thing you came along!

The question is how does one get started on the path to curing what amounts to an addiction to failure. The loser is a loser because they go for that sweet, sweet release of tension and stress they get by failing out of a situation every single fucking time.

The first step, as with all addictions, is admitting you have a problem. Us losers generally have enormous elaborate justifications for our choices and our poor life outcomes and it is not an easy thing to ask of people that they abandon all those explanatioins and excuses in favour of better results in the undetermined future.

It is the only way out of the maze of cages that is a loser’s life. But that does not make it any easier. I will totally understand it if people decide that, for now at least, they would rather stay in the warm familiar trap rather than begin gnawing their leg off.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

Once you have reached the point where you are ready for the next step, the next step is to begin as softly and slowly as possible.

You do this by examining your life with an eye towards finding the least challenging place in your life where you have been (or at least, usually do) pressing that fail button, and try holding on through that.

And it doesn’t even have to be a total resistance. It can be as simple as counting to three before you hit that panic button.

That way, you are in no sense trapped in the situation – you are just pausing for a few seconds before giving up.

This is an important first step because the way these panic disorders work is by generating a huge. overpowering wave of emotion that blots out all reason and restraint in order to overwhelm you and make you press that panic button.

But while this wave of emotion is very tall, it is also very brief. Simply waiting a few seconds will, over time. let your reason re-establish itself and give you the mental clarity to maybe decide to take things a little further.

It’s amazing how much easier it is to resist the urge to panic and flee once you have given yourself those vital moments to regain control.

But the vital thing to remember is that you remain free to exit the situation any time you like. Once again, YOU ARE NOT TRAPPED. The exit door is right there and it’s wide open. You are not taking any options off the table.

All you are doing is slowing things down a tiny bit. You will get that sweet release just like you usually do.

Just a few seconds later.

Once you get used to that, you can lengthen the delay. Or you can keep the same delay but try it on something a little more challenging, and work your way up from there.

At some point, the forces of failure will try ganging up on you by trying to convince you that because you didn’t manage to delay yourself that one time or that you backslid for a couple of days, that means the whole thing was a total failure and you might as well quit because the whole thing is futile.

This is total bullshit.

Failing once or twice at something doesn’t mean you will never succeed at it. And it doesn’t mean the whole thing was not worth doing either.

This is just that same failure fixated part of your mind trying that exact same trick – hitting you with a huge wave of emotion – to get you to give it that rush of relief that it really wants when you give up on improving yourself.

But do not believe its lies. Setbacks and failures mean absolutely nothing. You will still have the same options as if you had nothing but a long unbroken string of successes. Nothing has really changed.

Grab hold of that thought so you have it at the ready for when those failure addicts in your mind come calling to get you to give up on the one thing that can free you from their grips and open the whole world to you.

Because now, you are ready for their bullshit and can call it out for what it is.

And no fucking failing part of your mind can withstand that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There is exactly one difference between the winners and the losers of the world, and that is persistance.

Losers give up. Winners keep going. It’s really that simple.

Winners, when faced with a challenge or adversity, get mad and that anger doubles their determination to overcome the obstacle. They fight back.

Losers, on the other hand, give up at the first sign of real difficulty. It is, in fact, their default reaction to stress. Give up and GTFO, regardless of the cost.

But why? What is happening at the point of failure? What gives with us losers?

What losing gets us is escape. We exit the stressful situation because that brings instant relief from the stress. Sure, it might be a terrible thing to do in the long run, but it sure feels good in the short run.

To resist this urge to flee requires what I will call grit. It is the vital ingredient in this equation. It is a combination of emotional stability, self-esteem, confidence, and access to the kind of primal rage that powers the whole thing.

One can see, therefore, why us intellectuals have a reputation for lacking in it. Our very nature gives us plenty of access to complex logical reasoning but very little access to things like rage.

To be honest, rage freaks us the fuck out. We center our identities on our rational minds, and things like rage disable or decrease our ability to think rationally. and make us feel, God forbid. ‘out of control’.

To the neurotic intellectual (but I repeat myself), being “out of control” is one of the worst things possible because without rational control, how can you make the “right” decisions? How can you possibly cope with the world when the very thing you consider to be ‘you’ – your rational mind – has left the building?

We literally do not know who we are without it. But every instinct tells us that said person, who is not us, will do terrible things straight from our id.

Witness the famous tale of Doctor Jeckyl and Mister Hyde.

Back to grit. Without it, there is nothing to resist the urge to flee the situation. Collapse and retreat becomes the default reponse.

And it’s a terrible one.

All things in life will require some degree of grit. Nobody in the world, not even rich people or movie stars, gets to lead a life where everything is always easy, friendly, non-scary, and fun.

At some point and on some level, you have to be able to face your challenges head on and actually deal with them instead of constantly copping out.

That’s an unpopular message, to put it mildly. There are a lot of people wasting many, many years in the wasteland of denial about this basic truth and they have built up very elaborate and strong counter-responses to the very idea that success in life requires doing hard things that you don’t enjoy and are not fun.

I’m there myself. But I am fighting me way out of it.

The deadly dream is that either everything in the world can be easy and fun to get if some distant goal is achieved (becoming famous, getting a job in your field, whatever) or that it should be and the fact that it is not is damning evidence of the world being a harsh, cruel, unfair place of which you are the ultimate victim.

Yeah, that’s way better than actually getting ahead in life.

It is that kind of attitude that makes someone a loser. On a deep, fundamental level, they believe that they should never have to try really hard at something or keep going when it would be way easier (not better, just easier) to just quit.

I know this because I have discovered this attitude within myself, and I have also found it in other “failure to launch” types as well.

It is rarely spoken aloud because, as you can see, when articulated it is obvious how flimsy and pathetic it is. Most people suffering under this delusion have no idea it exists and would vehemently deny it existed in them at all if questioned.

In fact, they will likely become very, very angry. Which tells you something.

But if you analyze the pattern of their lives with this observation in mind, you will find dozens of instances of them giving up at even the thought of serious adversity. They may have a lot of highly inventive justifications for each and every one of them, all of which paint them as a helpless victim of cruel fate, but those rapidly crumble into dust when you challenge their idea that they ‘could not’ have done otherwise.

Sure you could have. All you would have had to do was hang in there. And the fact that this seems “impossible” to you really cuts to the heart of the problem.

Because it wasn’t impossible. It just would have taken grit.

And grit us, on some level, a choice. In thoses moments of strife, you choose whether you keep going or run away with your tail tucked beneath your legs.

It might not seem like a choice because you are so used to always giving up and giving in that it happens more or less automatically as your default response.

But it really is a choice. It must be, because other people choose differently. You choose to flee, and you can choose not to as well.

And if these words of mine have made you very, very angry – if you are now aflame with a rage that demands you utterly destroy everything I have said – and maybe me too – sit back and ask yourself why.

Why is the suggestion that you have to do hard things to get ahead so offensive to you?

Why do you feel like this whole thing has been a personal attack?

Why does the idea that you have been making choices hurt so bad?

Because I did not write this with the intention of hurting anybody. I don’t know you, so you know it’s not a personal attack. All I want to do is free people from the delusions that are holding them hostage and making them miserable.

Unfortunately, as the saying goes, the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

As somewhat of a soothsayer,. I know that better than most.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I am not talking about owning a power plant.

As many of you know, I am a utilitarian. That means that to me, the moral thing to do is always the thing that will increase the common good the most, or at least minimize the public harm as much as possible.

And that’s not really open for debate. I consider utilitarianism’s logic to be unassailable. In order to argue against it, you have to argue that it is possible for the moral choice to be the one that decreases the public good or increases the public harm.

And, ya know, good luck with that.

But as I was making my supper, I was thinking about my own situation with freelance work and whether I should give it another shot, and the phrase ‘increasing my personal utility’ popped into my head, and I suddenly realized that I had never applied utilitarianism to my own life. Ever.

It’s not hard to see why. Utilitarianism thinking skews hard towards the transpersonal. and like all us INTJ types, I am far more comfortable talking about transpersonal ethics, which are abstract and easy for us to understand because it is detached, rather than personal ethics, which tend to involve relationships with complex dynamics that pack an awful lot of emotional power and that freaks us the fuck out.

What can I say? We’re a strange breed of egghead.

Utilitarianism, however, does not actually contain an exemption for personal concerns. It dictates that one must always maximize the good for everyone, including yourself.

That harsh and unforgiving logic that makes utilitarian unappealing to some does not allow for the personal comfort even of utilitarians themselves. The right thng to do with your own life is that which maximizes personal utility as it is represented as part of the commond, public good. ^[1]

It’s funny – though hardly inexplicable – that it took me this long to figure that out.

This throws open the rather excitingly broad question of how, exactly, I would go about maximizing my personal utility. ^[2]

It is an intricately tricky question because logically, my depression has to be taken into account. Andthat complicates matters enormously.

A lot of the more obvious ways of improving my happiness level, like getting more education or searching for work on Writer’s Work, are made far more difficult and thus have a much higher utilitarian cost than they do for healthier folk.

Likewise, a lot of other ones falter on the banks of my lack of funds. I can’t afford to go to the clubs to look for a man, or go to places I might find my kind of dude like swanky intellectual type events, or even just go to free events of that kind.

But that has way more to do with the emotional cost. Going by myself to an event full of strangers who will judge me by my appearance is an incredibly huge challenge for my social anxiety and I would have to feel way, way better for that to be in the cards.

I wish I wasn’t like that. I wish that I could simply will myself to do things and that alone would be sufficient motivation for me to do the things I know would be good for me.

But it just ain’t so, Joe. My reality is heavily limited by my mental illness and that’s a truth that my rugged intellectual ass has never been able to fully accept.

I guess the illusion that I could start my life any second now is worth more to me than protecting myself from the harsh self-judgments that result from it.

I might want to rethink that.

Because deep down, I don’t think of myself as a cripple. Or disabled. The terrifying regime of my self-loathing superego will not allow for it because it automaticly vetoes anything which would reduce my self-punishment in the slightest.

I mean, if I truly accepted that I am a disabled person with a serious illness, that might lead to some kind of self-forgiveness, and seeing as I know deep in my heart that I am worthless degenerate parasite who deserves nothing good ever, just infinite punishment, that can’t possibly be right.

I mean, forgive myself for being mentally ill just because it’s something I never wanted and played no part in happening and in no sense bear any moral culpability for but in fact deserve sympathy for?

Now you’re just talking crazy,

Back on track : maximizing personal utility is a very important concept for me to hold onto no matter how much the forces of evil in my head want me to shy away for it as too complicated and scary an equation to solve.

Life is, indeed, much simpler when you pretend you aren’t personally involved.

Not better. Just simpler. Easier. Less work.

And work is the worst thing ever, right?

It’s a necessary step in my personal development because, and this is rather sad, I can only care about myself if I put it in detached, aloof, Olympian terms.

If I don’t, then I just get caught in the feedback loop of the thing being contemplated (my own best interests) feeding directly back into the thing doing the contemplating (my mind) and that quickly building to a deafening volume in my head and destroying my ability to think about anything.

At that point, all I can do is exit the process and try to put my head back together.

Now one might ask, well why is it the inability to think is so intolerable to you?

Other people seem to get by in life with barely any thinking at all. ^[3] From observation, it is clear that my idea of rational thought is not necessary for most people in order for them to have happy, fulfilling lives.

But not me. I need clarity of thought or I feel like something terrible is going to happen to me because I can’t think well enough to anticipate it and outsmart it.

And that’s actually a pretty big handicap, when you think about it. Life does not guarantee anyone the time or the space to think properly.

One might even think of that need as a disability.

But we all know those don’t apply to me, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I can’t very well ask God to bring me back to life, can I?

Wish I could, though. Faith has a lot of uses, and that’s one of them. A belief in God would give me “permission” to generate the emotions I need myself.

But it’s far too late for that. I can’t believe in something I know not to exist.

Or can I? I have been wondering for a long long time whether belief in a literal, actual, existing God is strictly necessary.

I am not saying faith can operate without belief…. that’s a logical non-starter.

No, what I am talking about is a God that only exists in the hearts and minds of human beings. A God that is as real as love or mercy or justice – no more,. no less. A version of God and Jesus that neither requires nor accepts any proof of existence outside the realm of the interior world of humans.

A God that provides comfort and solace and understanding and all those other vitally important emotional inputs without being expected to, say, cure Timmy’s cancer.

Which reminds me : what kind of a just and loving God won’t do good unless you literally beg Him to via prayer? It makes God seem like a petty asshole who is only in it to get off on the power He has over you.

Of course, that is applying logic to something logic neither created nor supports. God accepts prayers because we fundamentally need to believe that there is someone we can appeal to when we feel scared and helpless. A powerful Alpha figure who has the strength to fix our problems and give us the feeling that we are safe.

So sure, if God were a real person and not just something we dreamed up to fulfill our emotional needs, then yeah, He would be a petty tyrant sitting there while some desperate mother grovels at His feet, hoping she can submit to him and debase herself to him hard enough that He will save her child.

But this is about creating something to fulfill our basic needs as social creatures, and everything about must be seen in that light.

From that point of view, it seems like a God that exists only in the hearts and minds of followers seems possible. After all, that’s the primary function of faith.

The reason I wish to reduce said faith to a minimal non-interventionary form is that everything else gets God in trouble.

Religious cosmology got destroyed by geology and astrophysics because it made specific concrete predictions that could be disproven.

Compare that to “if you let Jesus into your heart, He will always be there for you. ” That essentially means God is real as long as you believe in Him, and makes no disprovable claims, and therefore can survive and endure and help people.

The question of whether said God is “real” in an external, provable sense becomes immaterial. You might as well be asking if Homer Simpson is “real”.

True, Homer doesn’t exist as a real human being outside of the cartoons, but he is real enough to be known the world over and move a lot of merch.

And like I have said before, there are many fictional characters from whom people have drawn inspiration and comfort. Probably not quite as many as have drawn comfort and inspiration from Jesus, but still.

You can know something is fictional, and still have it be very real to you.

So why not a semi-fictional God? One that is as real as love and pain and Homer Simpson. One that is not in any sense a “real person” but nevertheless fulfill the truly important functions of monotheistic religion without there being any chance of it being “disproven”, or in any other way coming into conflict with reality?

I think it could work.

Maybe I will write a book about it some day.

Back after a break. Wow, look at all those deep things I wrote.

It’s almost like I am smart or something.

One thing that weighs heavily on my mind from time to time is the question of whether I owe it to the world to use my extraordinary talents to make things better.

It’s an idea I instinctually resist because that would place a titanic burden of responsibility on me.

After all,. like Smilin’ Stan Lee used to say (we miss you Stan the Man), with great power comes great responsibility.

And I have great power. At least, in potentia. So it would follow that I have a great responsibility to figure out a way to use my powers for good, instead of just letting them rot on the shelf like expired beans.

The problem is that I am broken. The power is there but the transmission is shot and so the power never gets transmitted to wheels and I never get anywhere.

I just listlessly spin my tires by hand in a frictionless void and make the occasional vroom vroom noises as I pretend I am getting somewhere.

But I am not. I am down here in the same deep dark hole as always. The same deep dark hole that has swallowed me whole for my entire adult life. The blackest of holes, from which neither heat nor light nor love can escape.

Only information can escape. And so I type my lonely messages to the world, hoping someone will respond and prove to me that I am alive.

After all, I only exist when someone is paying attention to me. At least that is how it seems in this numbed out paralysis ward of a life of mine. I can’t feel my own existance so the only way to know I exist is to experience it through others.

Same with love, really. I pump it out so hard because I get so little of it back.

If only people could see below the charm and humor and wit. Then they would see the fires of Hell at work and the chorus of moaning demons demanding blood heat and the nasty little predators waiting to strike anyone unlucky enough to come near me and drain them of all that they are just so I can feel real for a second or two.

I wish I could be some other, healthier kind of person. But I am not.

I’m a parasite, and always will be,

I am just going to have to klearn to live with that,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not this kind :

But the kind that traps me like a fly in amber in this slow motion train wreck of a life

Still burning. Which is good,

What I am talking about is how. instead of dealing with things, my mind takes the “path of least resistance” and simply edits those things out of my consciousness.

For example, everything in this room is filthy and awful because I never clean. After all, wbhy clean when I can just ignore all the depressing stimuli by staying immersed in my video games or other computer things nearly all the time.

I know the piles of mess and disorder are there. But I don’t “see” them. My brain is a whiz at labeling things as “depressing – ignore” rather than doing what a healthy person would do and actually act on the stimulus of the depressing thing to make it stop being so god damned depressing.

Example : actually cleaning this place up so it doesn’t make me sad to look at or even think about it.

It’s all part of my anti-action bias. If something would normally lead to action, my depression heads it off at the pass and blocks it, with no regard for my long term wellbeing, happiness, or even sanity.

And that, in turn, is the result of my mind and its chemicals over-responding to my anxiety by making me too numb to stimuli to become anxious.

Totally not worth it.

And so in every way and on every level, I am blocked up. Almost all impulses to actually do things – for whatever reason – never even make it through to my consciousness, let alone actually get acted upon.

And I sit here naked in the cold and the dark of my frozen world and wonder why I never feel any love from the world.

I know people love me and care about me. The evidence is incontroversial. And i am a fairly lovable dude. So it’s not like I truly think their love and care is fake or undeserved.

But I don’t feel it. Or if I do, it’s so weak and feeble by the time it gets to me that it warms me about as much as the Sun warms Pluto.

WHICH IS A PLANET.

I want to feel it. I want that more than anything in the world. I would do anything to escape this fucking ice planet and go somewhere sunny and warm and free.

But deep down, below rational access, a much more primitive part of me likes the cold just fine because it offers a false sense of security and protection , and that part of me will veto anytbhing that might actually warm me up some, and label it as dangerous to the current order and the first step on a slippery slope to total madness and anarchy.

My soul is a fascist regime. I have mentioned that many times before. It places safety above any and all concerns and will do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal or deadly, to maintain its idea of “safety”.

Time for a fucking revolution then, says my long denied and super pissed off id.

I like my id now. He’s a fucking monster. But he’s my monster. And he knows now that I am working on freeing him, and is eager to get out there and kick ass and express all that social and territorial (and financial) ambition that depression has been suppressing for more or less my entire adult life.

I feel like I am finally ready to want things. To crave things. Right now, those deep yearnings are just one big ball of inchoate vitality, but eventually I will untangle them enough to at least occasionally act on them.

That sounds thrilingly dangerous to me. Acting on primal impulses is a new thing for me and that old regime of mine still feels like it can only lead to pain and error and confusion for yours truly.

But I don’t give a fuck. I am going to reconnect to my id and the vital life it contains if it fucking kills me. I need what it contains.

Because I want to be ALIVE god dammit. Not numb. Not asleep. Not hibernating. Not curled up inside myself with my eye shut tight to keep me from seeing scary things.

That turned out unexpectedly cute…. and sad.

Time for me to wake up from my asleep.

Time for me to yawn and stretch and get out of bed and take on that big bad world that I have missed during my long long nap.

Part of me is terrified by that idea. It has been hiding from the world in my numbness and dodging my pain via my torpor and is very, very scared of what happens when the dreamer wakes and the giant rises and all the things we have been delaying and denying come calling for us all at once.

Form an orderly line and we promise we will get to you as soon as we can.

And historically, this fear has had a very strong veto power over my entire life. It’s the other player in the long long stalemate that is the chess game of my life. It is the gremlins that tear apart anything I try to build within myself the moment my attention wavers. It is both warden and groundskeeper for my prison tomb and it likes to think it has its icy dagger eternally pressed to my pale and shallow throat.

But I see it now. I acknowledge it. I know what it is and how it operates. And armed thusly, I can dig deep into my bloodyminded stubbornness and my overflowing well of pure concentrated rage and attack it till it is forced to relent and free me.

Hmmmm. There’s a pretty good space opera type science fiction story in there somewhere. A rebellion against the wardens of a prison planet, increasing pressure to release a high profile prisoner, a regime finally brought to its knees by the forces of good. The rising of the id represented by the forces of nature overcoming the coldly mechanicality of the prison. Could be a heck of a thing.

Who knows. Maybe I’ll even write it some day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Taking a break from the heavy stuff to explore a thought.

We will start here : there are such a thing as natural communities.

And by “natural” I simply mean self-organizing as a result of human social instincts causing us to naturally form tribe, families, cliques, and so on.

Any group of people above a certain size will form these subgroups. It is the nature of the beast – the beast being us. Once a community exceeds the carrying capacity of its unifying identity, mitosis is inevitable and the only question remaining becomes whether the two new groups will both retain the original identity or if they will form their own new, unique identity that better serves their needs.

The important thing to note here is that the original identity can be retained That is because identity is not unitary in human beings : we easily accept and assimilate multiple layers of identity as long as those layers do not directly conflict with each other.

For example, starting with the outside and working our way in, I am a Canadian, a Prince Edward Islander, a Summerside boy, and part of the Bertrand family.

These identities do not conflict. Instead, they fit inside one another like a Russian nesting doll. A Prince Edward Islander is a kind of Canadian. And a Summerside boy is a kind of Islander.

And that’s just the governmental level of identity. In addition to my geopgraphical indicators, I am a graduate of VFS, a Furry, a nerd, a gay man, a Terry Pratchett fan, and so many others it would take an n-dimensional Venn diagram to map them.

And we are all like this in this modern world. We are all members of dozens of communities, each of which may very well have its own norms and etiquette, and we switch between them so smoothly we don’t even know we are doing it.

As I have said, this is possible only when the layers of identity do not conflict with one another. There is nothing about being an Islander that would keep me from being a Terry Pratchett fan. There is nothing about being a nerd that conflicts with my being a graduate of VFS.

And so forth and so on.

And then we come to that very special group to which we all belong : humanity. To me, the one big achievement of Christianity was to introduce humanism to the world as a replacement for the old, broken, and tired tribalism that came before it.

The idea that we are all part of one giant community called humanity began with them.

And 2019 years later,. we are still working on understanding it.

I just wrote this on Facebook :

I  feel like the history of modernity consists of Jesus (or whoever) saying “Love everybody. ” and humanity saying “Oh sure. Love everybody who counts. 
J : No, I said EVERYBODY. 
H : Right, right, everybody…. but these people. 
J : No, I SAID LOVE ALL PEOPLE. 
H : Oh. Then those people aren’t people. 
J : Are they biologically human? 
H : Well…. technically, yes, but not like you and me. 
J : Did I fucking stutter? LOVE ALL HUMAN BEINGS. 
H : Oh, sure, sure. Love everyone who doesn’t scare me. 
J : Read my fucking lips…. LOVE. ALL. HUMANS. 
H : But…. surely you don’t mean love X. 
J : I mean exactly that! X are just as human as you are and therefore you should love them. 
H : Well okay. 
J : Finally! Me Christ, you people are thick. 
H: But not Y. I mean,. Y are gross. Right? 
J : OH MY FUCKING DAD….

I am rather proud of that. It came out pretty much perfect.

Also, add this to my “angry, bitter messiah” file along with this :

And just think : that process is by no means over. There are groups we revile and repress right now that the progress of humanism over generations will exonerate and hold up as victims of prejudice and mob mentality.

Pedophiles might be next. Who knows?

Now it is obvious that creating a new overriding identity that can contain multiple existing identities is extremely difficult. Getting people to accept any kind of identity with which they are unfamiliar is hard enough, but when it’s a new Venn circle attempting to encircle all the rest, it’s damned near impossible.

But it can be done.

Sadly, over the course of history, this has mostly been accomplished via empire. Your little village, tribe, or city-state gets its ass kicked by a huge freaking army, and someone comes along and tells you that you are now a Roman (or Mongol, or Frenchman, or whatever), and it either sticks or it doesn’t.

The general rule seems to be that if you can make it stick via force for a generation, you can make it permanent. Sure, you hate the fucking Romans for all that killing and rapind they did, but your kids have been Romans all their lives and have trouble seeing what the big deal is.

It’s not always been conquest. Sometimes it’s even been by mutual consent. The USA, after all, first came together by the mutual accord of the 13 original States.

And here in Canada, we have, of course, the Fathers of Confederation, who undertook the mind boggling job of convincing people of the West Coast, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes that they were Canadians.

No wonder he had to more or less bribe people into it.

“Come join Confederation, and be proud Canadians, and unite to stop the encroachment of those heathens to the south of us!”

“Mmmmm… I don’t know…. ”

“*sigh* We will give you a ton of money and bring the railroad. ”

“In that case, GO CANABA! “

“It’s CANADA. ”

“Right, Canada, whatever… ”

And the thing is, it worked. I am Canadian. Living in the USA taught me that.

Because the real test of community identity on the social level is whether or not said identity correctly groups you with people with whom you have more in common than you do with the average outgroup human being.

And living with Americans made me realize that I had more in common with my fellow Canadians than merely the last part of my postal address.

Because Americans are fucking crazy,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…of the overgrown twelve year old that is me.

Today’s been OK. Same ol’ really. except for not feeling up to doing Paragon tonight.

The anxious pressure going out engenders had been building up in me for quite some time. Every time I managed to drag myself out the door for my usual social rounds, I felt like I was rolling my saving throw against a steadily rising in level attack, and I knew eventually I would fail.

Today I failed. Sad.

So no Paragon for me this week. Hopefully I have now gotten this anxiety out of my system and can go back to being fairly calm about stuff.

But whether it does or not, I am not going to let this become a pattern of avoidance. I skipped one thing one time and that was just to let the horses run around in corral a while so they tired themselves out.

Now it’s back into the barn and back to behaving themselves.

Still, I have been feeling a little bit of wanderlust lately. Spring brings that out in me, despite my generally being too chickenshit to do anything about it. I long for pastures anew. New people. new places, new experiences, new possibilities.

Anything to break the dull droning pattern of my misbegotten life.

I actually have the urge to deliberately get myself lost somewhere so that I have no choice but to explore my environment and hopefully put myself into the right frame of mind to simply accept things as they come without trying to force them into some kind of larger life pattern.

I did it because I thought it would be fun, and it was. The end.

Generally speaking I have only had experience like that…

a) …in my dreams. I mean. literally in my dreams. I have dreamed a lot of dreams where I get lost, and the more I try to get back to where I started or was planning to go, the more lost I get, until I have no idea where the fuck I am or how to get anywhere.

I figure this is my brain’s way of getting me out of my usual vigilantly reasoned frame of mind and into a state where the sort of dream logic solutions to mental conflicts can play themselves out.

Fair enough. Wish I could just take myself off the leash and dream all the dreams I need to dream, but I suppose that kind of thing doesn’t happen without drugs or some other form of hallucinogenic experience.

But I am ready. Pain, darkness, confusion, and the cold mean nothing to me any more. Bring it on. I eat your pain. I banish your darkness with my brightness. I mock your confusion, because who needs constant clarity anyhow?

And I drive the cold from my hearth with the healing powers of my firelight.

I have all the attributes and abilities of a poet except for the desire to write poetry.

So it comes out in prose, right here on my obscure and humble blog.

And I have often wondered what would happen if I simply stopped worrying about making sense or communicating a message and just let the imagery flow according to its own internal logic.

Might lead to some pretty amazing art that reasonates super deep with people because it comes from such a deep emotional place.

Might end up being complete and total twaddle.

Probable end up somewhere in between.

Another possibility would be to start going to these poetry slams and just freestyle that shit. That would be pretty dangerous because I could say some pretty crazy shit under those particular circumstances.

And they would be backed by my powerful verbal skills, so it would be weird shit that really makes a strong impression in people’s minds, one they never forget.

Still, I am pretty sure I could win those competitions. Especially when I have seen enough of them to get an idea of what sort of thing goes over well.

Then again, I might say “fuck all that” and tap into my penchant for doing things my own way and deliberately ignore what “works” in favor of what works for me.

And to hell with what the slackjawed sycophants want!

I’d be the “bad boy” of slam poetry. My word, would I enjoy that.

Let’s see…. oh, I got a $75 gift certificate for Amazon from my sister Anne today, for my lil ol birthday.

I am thinking of getting this :

Just kidding. It’s the Naipo Vibrating Massager Seat Cushion Massage for Full Back and Neck with 8 Motor Vibrations 4 Modes 3 Speed Heating for Home Office Car. 

Or “Joey” for short.

It’s a device to turbn any chair into a massage chair. Applies vibration and heat in various forms and amounts to your back to relax it.

I definitely need something to help with my back. And that product certainly seems impressive. And I have wanted a vibrating chair since forever.

I had something like it a long time ago, but it broke and I was way too depressed to deal with the whole warranty thing.

But I have never heard of Naipo before, and in this day and agem you have to be careful with buying stuff from overseas because there’s some seriously bad actors selling people total crap and it makes the whole market seem tainted.

So maybe I will, maybe not. But I am looking for something like that, if not that one specifically. Something that can tackle my fat dense stacks of back pain and maybe actually give me some time when my back doesn’t hurt at all.

And I haven’t had one of those since my second growth spurt.

Right now, I am going to do the next best thing, which is to lay down and rest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ow, my soul is burning!

Quick, get me some spiritual Lidacane!

Feeling somewhat better today.

Part of that is the usual post-therapy euphoria I have felt since I first went to therapy as a teen. It feel good just to have someone listen to me and take me seriously and let things be all about me for a while.

I really need that kind of validation. It helps me fight the darkness inside that says that I am nobody and nothing and worthless and don’t deserve anything ever.

After all, anything that goes to me is wasted and should go to someone who deserves it more, namely literally anybody else.

There’s a monster in my head…. and it’s trying to kill me.

It also helps that the weather is sunny and pleasant without being oppressively hot. That is, as patient readers know, my ideal weather.

So that got me feeling good too,. In fact, immediately after therapy, I was downright chipper. And I like that. I feel like I got a glimpse of the person I might have been had I not been raped. The person I still could be if I ever finish detoxifying myself.

No big surprises there. He’s cheerful, funny. silly, and quite fun to be around, with an infectious positive energy and buckets of charm.

He’s Fruvous, basically. My spiritual hero and role model.

The real world never provided me with anything like a hero and/or role model, so it’s not surprising that I had to invent my own.

When you are a one of a kind original like myself, none of the pre-made off-the-rack solutions work for you. They just don’t fit. They are fine for others, but they just do not work for yours truly.

So I have to make my own.

After all, I am the guy who solved the problem of not getting permission from those dickheads at Samuel French to do the play I wanted to do by just writing my own play.

That is not how most people would solve that problem. But for me, that was the easiest and most natural thing to do.

Some of us are just born to create, I guess.

Anyhoow, despite all the warm and fuzzy vibes today, I am still keeping that fire burning inside of me. I am still both warmed and tortured by the flames and I am also still determined to keep it going for as long as I can.

For the rest of my life, hopefully.

Because I know that my perkiness today comes from the same place as that burning searing cleansing flame. The same fire that burns me can also uplift me and support me if I clear away the bullshit and let its magic fill my soul.

I have often thought of myself as an extinguished optimist – someone who is not naturally negative or pessimistic, and only got that way because of mental illness.

It would be lovely to lighten my load enough for that inherent optimism to take over and lift me up.

Right now, it just can’t provide enough thrust to overcome depression’s gravity.

But some day!

Finding it hard to focus on the words tonight. That’s the unfortunate but handleable side effect of all this sunshiny happiness. It puts my brain into summer mode, and summer mode is way less focused and intense than winter me.

It would happen when I was a kid too. Summer would roll around and suddenly I was looking out the window or staring off into space when I should have been paying attention in class.

I usually found I hadn’t missed much when I finally yanked myself back to reality. Life can be rough when you’re bright enough to have gotten what the teacher was telling us the first time.

Then you have to wait while she explains it over and over again until the dumbest students have understood it too.

God, I was so fucking bored in school.

As I have confessed before, I was far too socially clueless to realize what a jerk I was being when I was obviously barely paying attention to the teacher.

And I am ashamed of how pleased with myself I was when, with every new teacher, I got to show off by waiting for the teacher to call me out for not paying attention then repeating back everything they had just said, verbatim.

Shit…. I just remember that there were times I did that without even looking in their direction. I still wasn’t paying attention to them.

God damn it…. no wonder my teachers didn’t want to lift a finger to help me. I was a smug little shit.

All I can say in my defenses is that I was just being my honest self. I never set out to hurt anybody or put anybody down. Nothing was done out of malice or some kind of sadistic desire to wreak havok.

I was just reacting honestly to the situation I found myself in – namely that I was stuck in classes that lasted hours that only taught me things I could have learned in minutes.

And I can honestly say that it would never have occurred to me to pretend to pay more attention than I naturally would. That was nowhere on my radar. If someone had asked me to do it, I would have (with most teachers, anyway).

But that’s how clueless I was. Same with conforming to fit in. Never occurred to me. I tried my best to get along with people but like I have said many times before, I have always been ferociously myself and that is simply not negotiable.

And to be honest, I think that might be the biggest symptom of my social damage ever. The vehemence with which I reject all suggestions of conforming is not normal, and reminds me of some of the strong, no-negotiation responses I have seen from people who are on the autism spectrum.

And no doubt my lifr would have been a lot easier if I had been willing and able to bend at least a little bit to fit in.

After all….. everyone else does.

But no, I am a strident individualist whether I want to be or not. The die is cast and I am unlikely to change at my advanced age.

All I can do is remind myself that I am a very nice and pleasant fellow most of the time, despite this lack of flexibility, and the odds of something making me go all squirrelly as as an adult are quite remote.

Just as long as NOBODY TRIES TO OVERWRITE MY IDENTITY WITH THAT OF A GROUP OR OTHERWISE INFRINGES ON MY INDIVIDUAL SOVERIGNTY.

But what are the odds of that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m still pretty fucking depressed.

My life still sucks. That feeling of being too large an animal in too small a cage grows daily. I feel pissed off about everything in my life because it alllllll SUCKS.

Except, as stated before, my friends. They rock.

But everything else sucks.

It’s just not enough, you know? This content free life of mine where nothing I do has any meaning or lasting impact. Where the best thing I can say at the end of the day is “I guess that wasn’t all that bad. ‘

I need more. I need more than mere survival. I want to earn money and be productive and live a real, functional. purpose driven life instead of doing my best to make the time pass by as painlessly as possible.

And so I burn with rage. And you know what? It feels good to burn. The pain is there but it means nothing to me. It feels good to burn with anger deep in my soul because like a raging forest fire, it cleanses as it destroys, and despite my pain, I actually feel cleaner inside than I have for a very long time.

All those useless and pathetic emotions I suppress really start to stink up the place after a while. This fire destroys all that latent bullshit.

Or at least, takes out a lot of it.

In fact, right now, what I am worried about is that I can feel myself running out of dry tinder to burn. I want to keep the purge going, but I am running out of material.

SO basically, I have the dry heaves of the soul.

So what I want the most now is to make sure I remember.

Remember that to burn feels good and clears me out and makes for a healthier me. Remember, so that long after the embers have died down to a dull red and I have, alas, returned to my former torpor, I at least have some idea of how to get things going again, or if not, at least how to make myself feel better for a while.

But I hope that won’t be necessary. I am holding on to my glorious flame this time and keeping it pressed to my flesh so that it may continue to burn all that is impure from me.

I don’t give a fuck about the pain. When you have been as numb as I have been for as long as I have been, and have spent so much time in the cold and the dark, even the pain of searing flesh feels good because at least I am finally feeling something.

The pins and needles pain as a limn that has fallen asleep wakes up comes to mind. Sure, it’s technically an unpleasant feeling, but it feels way way better than the very disturbing numbness and feeling of wrongness that preceded it.

Ergo, I want to burn as hard, hot, and long as I possibly can. That involves both ignoring the pain (which is meaningless anyhow) and suppressing my own internalized (and vastly overdeveloped) fire suppression systems.

Normally, said systems pounce on the slightest spark and drown it in waters icier than the North Atlantic in winter at the slightest provocation.

But part of the lesson of this period in my life is that I have to turn that shit way the fuck down if I hope to remain amongst the living. Numbness, as soothing as it can be, is the enemy because it’s that numbness that cuts me off from all that is good in the world and leaves me in the cold and the dark all the time.

And all to keep my anxiety at bay. Well there are things far worse than freaking out from time to time. Things that are actually worse than a panic attack. Worse, even, that those horrible times when I have had a panic attack in a public place and felt like everyone there hated me and wanted me to crawl off and die somewhere so that nobody would have to endure me ever again.

Those were bad. Very, very bad. And it’s been a long time since that has happened. And I am grateful for that.

But some prices are far, far too high to pay for peace. And some kind of peace cost far, far too much to be justified.

So fuck peace. I would rather spend my days wracked by torment like Nietzsche if that is what it takes to stay alive and aware and activated.

And here is the ultimate : I will keep this fire lit even if I have to go search for victims to vent my rage upon to do it.

It will still be on my own terms, of course. I am not abandoning my ethics entirely. I am just opening the door to actually venting on people who deserve it.

It’s like being an ethical vampire. I must feed. But I will only feed on those who deserve such a fate.

And they are out there, just waiting for me to emerge from the shadows and destroy them with my dark and dreadful powers.

Well, not them. But their vile opinions, anyhow. We live in “interesting times” and the world could use a guy like me to absolutely destroy all the lies and delusions that support and shelter the ignorant and repugnant amoral monsters who are hell bent on destroying the world for their own personal (and transitory) gain.

I long to add my voice and through it the fearsome force of my unique and powerful mind to the world’s current state of debate.

I see the people fighting the good fight against the forces of evil and cry out to not just join them but to arm them with the kinds of weapons only I can create.

All I need is a platform for my views that will get them the attention and reach they deserve, and I will rewrite the world with my words.

But where would I find such a platform?

How can I get my words to those who need them the most/

What could possibly make my voice heard amongst the billions already speaking.

I really don’t know.

But it’s something worth thinking about, isn’t it/

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.