My birthday was fine.

Had it at White Spot. I feel lucky that circumstances conspired to sync my birthday with FRED. Not only did that mean that all of my friends were there without my even having to invite them, I got to celebrate my birthday on my actual birthday instead of the nearest convenient weekend or whatever, and for that, I am truly grateful.

Joe got some tailor done for me, plus got me a couple of cool T-shirts. Felicity paid for my dinner. I expect a card from my mother any day now – apparently she sent it a while ago and it’s taking a long time to get to me.

I expect I will get gift cards from my siblings eventually.

I know my mother sent the card a long time ago because I got to talk to her Sunday afternoon. I love hearing from my mother. Just the sound of her voice makes me happy. I may have issues with how I was raised and what messages I got, but at the end of the day, she’s still my Mommy, and I love her super hard.

I have got to get to see her before she passes. Or I will pass shortly after her.

From her, I learned Catherine is possibly going to be coming home to PEI this August. That, obviously, would be when I would want to be there should some miracle deposit the $1000 or so the trip would take into my bank account before then.

I want to see my family and the old home town. I must be reaching that point in the karmic cycle where I want to reconnect with my roots. I get quite homesick sometimes and I guess I have been away from Summerside long enough that all the residual Summerside left in my system has been purged and I am now able to admit it.

For many many years, I was just glad to have gotten out of there. It was far too small a cage for the likes of me. There’s a reason that ‘the Island’s biggest export is brains”.

What, excactly, would have been there for an intellectual monster like me to do?

So you can understand how for a long time, I didn’t even want to think about coming back. Once you get out of that tiny cage, the last thing you want is to go back to visit it.

In every small town escape case like me there lurks a fear that somehow it will drag us back in. Like it has its own gravity well and it takes a constant input of energy in order to stay out its grips.

After all, every small town is a universe unto itself. When you grow up in one, whether it’s a tiny villages or a thriving hamlet, the town limits are the walls of your reality and everything in your life is bounded by those walls.

When you finally escape, you are essentially leaving known space, and it takes a long time to accept that this newer, biggest universe is your home now and you belong there and it is safe to put down roots.

Assuming you have the resources to do so. I just turned 46 and I don’t have them yet. Without a job or romance, there is not enough to anchor me to one place.

All I have is my friends, and while they are marvelous, wonderful, and very patient with me,. man cannot live by friendship alone.

No wonder I always feel like a balloon terrified of coming loose from its string and sailing off into the sky till it can’t even see the ground any more.

It’s that fear that makes me cling to things as hard as I do. I have a bad case of vertigo of the soul and it feels a lot like gravity is working in the wrong direction and that if I am not super, super careful, I will fly into the sky and never come back down.

And all that would be left of me here on Earth would be a drooling vegetable where once a truly extraordinary mind once lived.

I know that all sounds crazy. But that’s how I feel inside. All I can do is express how I feel. I can’t guarantee that it will make sense or seem sane.

I’m a lunatic like any other. I just fool people by being a highly articulate lunatic who gives the appearance of being very sane. logical, pragmatic, and smart.

But the truth is that I am crazy, and not (just) in the comedy sense.

It;s not something I think about much. The fact that you are not sane is a very distressing and disturbing thought that attacks the very foundations of your sense of reality, and so it is a very unpleasant thing to ponder.

Plus it conflicts with depression’s maximize self-loathing programming. After all, if I am crazy, that means I am sick, and if I am sick, then I have an excuse for doing so poorly in life, and that would mean reducing my amount of self-loathing, so clearly that thought cannot be allowed to live.

Why, that would jeopardize everything my depression stands for!

But I really am a crazy person. A mental health services consumer. I have many active delusions – beliefs that directly contradict reality yet nevertheless persist because they are a product of a chemical imbalance and while that imbalance remains, so do the delusions it engenders.

I am just lucky that I am neurotic, not psychotic, and so my delusions are all emotional, like feeling like everyone hates me and wishes I would just crawl off and die.

This is patently untrue, and yet, I still feel that way most of the time. It’s very hard for me to believe anyone actually wants me around.

Even at my own birthday party, part of me felt like nobody there really liked me.

That’s what happens when you are held hostage by your own goddamned brain chemicals and nothing you can thik or feel will change that.

So there are things you know to be false, but still can’t help but believe.

And to me, that’s what madness feels like :

Knowing something is wrong and that making no difference.

Some problems can’t be solved by thinking.

And against them, I am helpless as a child.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Can’t say it’s much of an improvement.

But then again, I just woke up all hungry and horny and miserable, so I might not be the best judge of things at the moment.

I am eating my leftovers from last night’s Lamb Rogan Josh from Tandoori King Cafe as I am typing away at you nice folks. It’s spicy and delicious.

Maybe a little too spicy. And I ordered it Mild, as always. They also have Very Mild, but I will die from chemical burns to the soft palate before I order THAT.

I know that refusing to let aging give me blank tastes seems like a weirdhill to choose to die on, but I have refused to be boring for my entire life and I am told old and cranky and set in my ways to stop now.

I refuse to order the food equivalent of an Easy Listening radio station.

Spicy food does help clear out the sinuses, though, and mine pretty much always need it. It’s annoying the keep having to blow my nose, but I will feel better afterward.

My birthday FRED will be at 7 pm tonight at the White Spot at 3 Road and Ackroyd. I guess I am looking forward to it. It’s nice to have a time, one day a year, when I am allowed to want to be the center of attention.

Bit worried that I haven’t gotten a card from my Mom yet. She’s usually quite punctual with that kind of thing. I hope everything is okay.

Experimenting with this feeling of crankiness and irritability. I have to admit, on one level, it’s actually kind of fun.

Grr, world. I am cranky and cross and quite put out. Cross me at your peril, for I know many angry, cutting words and have a rapier wit!

Rapier than what, I don’t know.

Honestly, what I want for my birthday right at the moment is sleep. I am running on like three hours of sleep right now and it ain’t enough. Once I am done eating and have my 500 words for this session, I am going to get my laundry started then go the fuck back to bed and to hell with everything else.

Yesterday’s experiment in voiding my buitterness and pain seems to have done me some good, which is nice. There is still a lot of that in me, but it felt good to get rid of a ton of it in all those “I hate” statements.

And I stand by all of them. I hate my stupid fucking life and all its pointless bullshit and unwarranted pain and deep down agony and confusion.

PRetend happy just isn’t cutting it any more. For decades, I have limped along pretending to be okay well enough to fool even myself.

But I am not okay. I am a deeply unhappy, unsatisfied , unfulfilled person and it high time I face this fact and maybe even do something about it.

Or at least put a name to my suffering.

---

Part 2 of My Birthday Blog is brough to you by the letters X and Z and the number 5.

I’ve had a little sleep and I feel a little better. But I still feel cranky and depressed.

I will do my best to straighten out my mood enough to behave myself at my own damn birthday party, at least. I know that my emotions are very close to the surface and that I am in the middle of an exceptionally long and productive emotional expectorations and so the risk of inappropriate responses is high.

So I am watching myself like a hawk, so to speak.

I am always very emotional on and near my birthday. I guess that’s my response to being “solarized” in the astrological sense, meaning the Sun is in my Sun sign and that means I am in a somewhat overcharged state.

In a perfect world, this would actually make me super happy as I would be able to use all that energy to buoy my mood and I would be flying high.

Instead, I just feel moody and pissed off at the world. Wonderful.

Oh well, at least I am finally feeling like a teenager. Next I will be telling my roomies that they don’t understand me before slamming my bedroom door behind me, turning my music up super loud, and flopping down on my bed in tears, my teen heart breaking.

I know how this works. I’ve seen TV.

Been pretty horny lately. but without the motivation to do much about it. My low success rate re : actually getting to ejaculate has me down.

Maybe a partner would help. Maybe not. Lately, when I imagine myself in a realstic sexual situation (as in, me and an adult human male), I imagine myself panicking and switching into “performance mode” where I simply stop thinking about my own needs and use my considerable gifts to rock my partner’s world.

Sex can be really hard for me, as I have mentioned before. No matter how much my body wants it, I also experience a very strong panic attack type reaction and it’s like my mind goes blank and….

I’m sorry. I can’t continue that line of reasoning because I just got off the phone with my mother and now it feels weird.

Audience : Oh right, NOW it’s weird.

I always love hearing from my mother. She is such a sweet and gentle soul and I love her boundlessly and with great joy.

Damn, I should have asked her if she has an email address yet. I would love to be able to email her. Phoning her is not really an option because reasons.

Being cuckoo in the coconut reasons.

Mental health reasons.

But email I could totally do. Unlike a phone call, email doesn’t barge into people’s live and demand you pay attention to it RIGHT NOW.

Also, it’s just text, so it’s not as socially stimulating as a phone call either.

I hate that my mental illness makes it so hard to stay in contact with people.

On the other hand, they could always contact me too, and they never do. So I guess they don’t want to stay in contact with me all that bad.

What a happy thought to end on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got a lot of bad stuff to exorcize from myself tonight.

Because I am really fucking sick of my stupid fucking life. I want to finally go out into the world and start living instead of merely surviving in my stupid little hole.

I hate this room, I hate this computer, I hate the filth I live in because I am too emotionally crippled to clean, I hate the fact that I turn 46 tomorrow and emotionally I am not even a teenager yet, I hate my low station in life where here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all I can do is barely survive two rungs up from the bottom of the ladder 9nelow me are welfare and homelessness), I hate that I have so many health problems, many of them undiagnosed, that it’s a wonder that I don’t just keel over and die, I hate that I am so unhealthy because my mental illness keeps me from looking after myself, I hate that I have next to no power, say, influence, or impact on the world, I hate that my life consists mostly of playing video games in order to escape the agony of my existence, I hate that my existance is agony, I hate that I can so clearly feel and see all the good2 I could do in the world 9both for others and for myself) if only I could slip depression’s leash and run free and get the piece of paper people demand before they let me show them all my magical abilities, I hate that I see nothing but a slow and stupid slide into to a pathetic and meaningless grave in my future, I hate that what dreams I have had have died like dinosaurs in the LaBrea tar pits of my mind, I hate that I am pathetically and cringingly dependent on others for even this pale existance, I hate that despite all this ability, I can’t seem to make myself put my work in front of others who might be able to help me, I hate that I am so weak and lame and pathetic that all the magical powers in the world can’t motivate me enough to overcome my roadblocks, I hate that I have all this latent rage that makes me want to smash everything around me with a SLEDGEHAMMER and destroy everything I can get my hands on out of sheer mindless animal aggression, I hate that fatuous fucking idiot I see in the mirror every time I take a piss, and most of all, I hate that I hate myself so fucking much!

And I hate how huge and unweildly that paragraph is, plus I hate that I am too pissed off and emotional to fix it.

I am just plain sick to death of my life, my place in the world (or lack thereof), sick of having less than zero dignity, sick of being this ludicrous excuse for a human being, sick of being sick all the goddamned time, sick of always being on the outside looking in at the warm, live, strong, normal people who have no idea how good they have it because they can’t even imagine being like me, sick of freezing in the dark, sick of my own mental masturbation that never really gets me anywhere, sick of constantly victimizing myself out of both lack of knowing how to stop and fear of where all that anger will go if I do, sick of having nothing I can truly call my own, sick of feeling like I am never doing what I am supposed to be doing (oh yeah, that’s back), sick of feeling like a massive failure at life, sick of being stuck being me, and sick of wishing a dozen times a day that I could just start over wuith what I know now.

I promise I will do a much better job of it this time!

Sometimes, I feel so lost and confused that I want to cry out for my mommy, but she’s thousands of miles away and can’t help me anyhow.

She couldn’t help me even when I was the right age for crying out for your mother. Once she went back to work, it was just easier to concentrate on the three children she actually wanted, and leave me to largely fend for myself and do my best not to remind people that I existed, let alone had actual needs.

Needs are for people who are worth something.

I was to be grateful they let me stay.

I hate that I have all this damage that I can feel quite keenly but cannot heal. Or at least, that heals so slowly that I won’t actually recover till I’ve been dead for five weeks.

I hate that said damage means I am stuck reprocessing the childhood I hated over and over again in order to extract the tiny drops of recovery I get with each pas.

I hate that just to cope with all my fucked up circuitry, I have to keep myself in a numbed stupor which lets the time slide with a frictionlessness that is positively nauseating.

How did May go by so fast? Depression, that’s how.

I hate that I know these chains that bind me are of my own devising and that they will only break when I no longer need them, and yet that does not free me at all.

I hate that I can feel just how wrong I have turned out. I feel the difference between me and others like a tongue probing the cavity where a tooth once lay, and it makes me feel like I am not even a real human being and a member of the human race.

I am just a ghost of a thought of a memory of an idea, no more substantial than the shadow of smoke, and one of these days I will simply melt away.

In short, I hate absolutely everything about my stupid fucking life except my friends..

Other than that, it can all go to hell.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let me tell you all about my friend Luke.

That’s not his real name. To be honest, I have no idea what his real name is. It’s his furry name. The name of his fursona. He’s Luke like I am Fruvous.

For the record, I’m a fox and he’s a porcupine. Not that it matters.

He and I met on Tapestries MUCK two or three months ago, at a gay bar there subtly and creatively named Sodom.

Get it? Like the one in the Bible!

And we hit it off immediately. I wish like hell that I could recall the actual conversation, but the skinny of it was that he not only jumped in on a joke I was riffing, he did so with such intelligence, wit, insight, and knowledge that to me, it was like he had stepped out of the shadows and lit up like an angel afire with the faith.

And we went back and forth like that for a half a dozen more exchanges. and my enchantment with this amazing fellow only grew.

I wish I had the words to convey how much this meant to me. Suffice it to say that, looking back, I now know what the perfect way to get my romantic attention and hold it and deepen it is, and it’s what Luke did that night.

It;s ironic how hard it is to say how important verbal things like that mean to me in words. I guess you are either that kind of wordy person or not.

Anyhow, after that, I was always super excited to see him on, and I hope he felt the same. I loved talking with him and hanging out together and finding out more about him and his life.

Turns out he, in mundane reality, he’s an elderly gentleman who worked for the federal government and who comes from a large and well developed redneck tribe full of manly types who root hogs, drag stumps, build cars, and do all kind of other impossibly butch things I could never even dream of doing.

This also made him more attractive to me. I am drawn to that kind of hands-on competence because it is so unlike my own odd assemblage of talents. I stand in awe of people who can tackle life’s practical problems so easily and so well.

I mean, the man used to participate in demolition derbies.

That’s so goddamned butch that it makes me feel like a silly little girl by comparison.

Not that that is a bad thing. It can be, in fact, quite nice. And it showed me what I brought to the relationship : the feminine.

He was just a gruff tough and ready old porcupine who needed a sweet and silly little foxy to be his counterpart.

I was all too happy to comply.

And we would exchange links to music we like. That’s how I learned about songs I now love like this one :

And this one :

And this one :

And many more. All wonderful music, and all stuff that I would never have come across in a million years without him because they are so outside my usual sphere.

And people who know me know how much music means to me. So the fact that he could introduce me to stuff so wonderful and so different was wonderful too.

I wish I could say he liked my music as much as I liked his, but nope. His tastes are a lot more specific and narrow than mine.

I had better success with funny videos.

So over these few months, I have grown very fond of this amazing man. I won’t say we had a relationship, because that word comes with more baggage than an arctic expedition and besides, we’re both too old and tired for that crap.

But we got along real well. And enjoyed one another’s company, which like my daddy said is the most important thing.

Now I told you all that so I could tell you this : quite recently, he told me that he is dying.

I knew he wasn’t well because he had been forced to retire from his federal job because he just could not do the work any more. So it wasn’t a total surprise.

But somewhat foolishly, I thought that just put him and I on the same level. He was too sick to work and so am I.

But then he kept ending up in the hospital, and I worried about him a lot. But still, the thought of death was not on my mind.

Maybe I am capable of self-delusion after all.

But then he went to see a specialist, and when he came back, he told me, as he put it, that “he’d probably seen his last snow”.

And I didn’t know how to handle that, I have never known anyone who was dying before. I have no frame of reference for it. It lies completely outside my sphere of experience and understand.

It was, to put it mildly, one hell of a moment.

But it made me all the more determined to be as delightful and funny and cute for him as I could. And in my mind, I imagined that I had until fall or thereabouts.

But no. While we were talking this morning, he got a call from the hospital telling him he had to come in right away, as in NOW.

And you know it’s bad when the hospital calls YOU and not the other way around.

So as far as I know, he could already be dead. And if he is, there is nobody to tell me. I am quite sure his family has no idea I even exist.

I can’t imagine how he would explain being a furry to them, let alone a gay one.

And other than that, there is nobody to tell me. I might have heard my last from him and there is no way for me to know for sure.

So right now, all I can do is hope to hear from him again.

And that’s why I needed to tell you all of this.

Because I have never felt this helpless before in my life.

And I don’t know what to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Everything is always one layer more complicated than I think it will be. Even when I try to compensate for that fact.

It’s like peeling an infinite onion.

Here’s the scoop : vanilla.

Here’s the real scoop : So I did nothing ro further my career goals today. Instead I played Fallout 4 all afternoon.

And played WITH Fallout 4 all afternoon.

See, at one point, when the game was only semi-old, I played the hell out of it. I must have beaten the game at least eight times, each time with a different character build ino order to keep things interesting.

But I did not know modding was even a thing back then. So the one thing I did not do with it was mod it.

Well after being frustrated with some new releases I have tried recently, I decided to finally get around to re-installing the game and now I have discovered a simply massive mod scene almost as big as Skyrim’s.

Uh oh, part of me says.

Anyhow, the point of all that was that I did not pursue my ambitions today, and I am beginning to worry that my current relaxed approached (no pressure, it’s not what I am supposed to do, etc) means I have essentially given myself infinite permission to fuck around and never get around to doing anything that isn’t 100 percent fun, and the hyper controlling part of me is freaking the fuck out about it.

I keep reminding myself that the secret is to ask myself if I want to do it. And I mean, genuinely want, not just “That would be nice, I guess”.

But that overactive superego of mine had an awful lot of trouble with the idea that something will get done in its own time and wants schedules, goals, deadlines, and all that other stuff that sounds great on paper but just makes me depressed.

I can’t operate like that. I wish I could, but I can’t. I can work like hell when someone else generates the impetus and goals, but on my own, it’s a no-go.

I just can’t generate my own structure. Not one that will actually work for me, anyhow.

I can come up with all kinds of practices, habits, and systems (oh the systems!) that would totally move me towards my goals in a smooth and predictable manner.

If I actually did them. Which I would not. The part of my mind that is so good at making systems that sound really smart and efficient and creative has not yet learned to take into account the fact that my motivational machinery is all clogged up with thick, cold, sticky wads of depression and so anything complicated is absolutely beyond me.

I really don’t want to believe that. I would like to go on thinking that some day I will invent the system that changes everything for me. It’s a very lovely delusion and I will miss it terribly.

But I have to face the facts. (Literally. I can’t help myself. ) I am never, ever, ever going to solve my problems via thinking. Mentation, in this situation, is nothing more than mental masturbation, or maybe a hamster wheel for my overpowered mind.

It amounts to the same thing.

So right now I am conflicted. Struggling with myself, even. Like everything that has to do with the roid monkey that is my superego, it’s like defusing a bomb. One false move and the whole thing explodes.

Maybe that’s the wrong approach, though. Maybe that’s giving that crazy motherfucker exactly what it wants. Maybe I should be setting it off on purpose in order to desensitize myself to it and burn it out.

I hope not. That sounds hard.

I am stuck trying to figure out how I motivate myself to do the things I want to do without it turning into another self-prosecutorail arena where that fucking monkey beats me over the head with the fact that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing because I am a pathetic loser and a horrible, broken, diseased person and the world would be better off if I just…

I think you get the drift. I can only avoid the downward spiral if I don’t trigger it.

There has to be a better way.

What i want most is to find and firmly connect with my own, genuine, intrinsic motivations for doing the things I want to do. That way, there is no conflict between what I want to be doing and what I am doing when I do those fruitful things.

Doing things based on your intrinsic motivations turns what can be a very complicated issue into something as pure and simple as masturbation.

Nobody needs an extrinsic motivation to masturbate.

To put it mildly. it’s its own reward.

But my psychological scar tissue gets in the way. And my general fearfulness about unpredictable things with no clear end point.

That whole, ‘I will not set foot on a road till I know where it goes’ thing.

It’s very, very limiting.

It’s insane (then again, so am I) that there is a part of me that refuses to hook up those intrinsic motivations because that could change everything and it assumes that all change is a descent into chaotic madness unless it can verify that it is not.

Change is scary, even when it’s good.

I have so many conflict layers of fear and aversion that it’s no wonder I am so confused most of the time.

There is a lot going on between my ears, most of it violent. I wish I could just tear down all the walls and let all the waters of my mind mingle and combine until it is all quiet and calm and serene because all the conflicts have been resolved.

Sure, I’d be a vegetable. But a happy vegetable.

There are times when being a happy vegetable seems infinitely preferable to being a miserable genius. It’s not like having all these brains has ever done me much good.

I never attracted a competent mentor.

The ease with which I aced my academics never brought me to the notice of anyone looking for young talent.

Nobody ever viewed me as something valuable that should be nurtured and protected so that I would reach my full potential.

Everyone just left me all alone, in the doldrums, forever.

And I am still thre.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I have taken a few baby steps towards getting back into freelance writing today.

The preliminary steps are done and I can get on to the real meat and potatoes (with sage and onion) of the endeavour : job hunting.

It’s very hard on me, emotionally speaking.

Every job posting has the potential to make me feel hopeless and inadequate and small. The risk of losing all confidence in myself is rampant, and the temptation to just give up and go back to playing video games all day is constant and strong.

Luckily for me, I am extremely stubborn and that means that once I start something, I see it to the end. So the actual odds of my giving up are low, barring some crazily unpredictable emotional blow or somesuch.

Not that I want to be giving the universe any ideas.

But looking through the job postings is like dragging myself over jagged rocks on my hands and knees. Unfortunately, I am not an enlightened being, and so deciding to do it does not end all internal resistance to doing it.

So it’s been a hard day. I found I could only job search for half an hour today. After that, my coping resources (or “spoons”) were all used up.

But I got six leads out of it, so it will do.

The one I am most interested in at the moment is this one.

It’s a call for a writer for a Youtube channel called Charisma On Command, and they make absolutely facsinating videos like this :

I love this kind of thing! Detailed and thoughtful, practical insights on a subject as fascinating and rewarding as human charisma.

And I could totally write scripts like that. From my writer’s point of view, it’s just a long voiceover script, and those are a lot easier to write than, say, a complex script with a lot of characters, stage direction, special effects, and so on.

My one problem is that I am not sure I have the knowledge I need. The people who makes those videos have clearly given the subject a lot of thought (as have I) as well as having done a ton of research (um, nope).

Hopefully, if I watch enough of their videos, I will pick up the style of their insights and be able to write in their style.

I mean, I could write about celebs I like and what I think makes them so likable, but I highly doubt my POV would match theirs and in a series like this one, you absolutely have to keep the editorial POV consistent.

That’s what allows people to just relax and enjoy the content as they let the knowledge wash over them, unimpeded by any thoughts about how it’s being presented.

So I will need to watch a ton of their vids in order to match their style. Luckily, their show is awesome, so it’s not that big a deal.

Now let’s talk about Writer’s Work.

Now that I have sampled the actual service, I must say I am deeply unimpressed. The first shock was to realize that they use other job search sites for their job listings.

That means nobody actually posts anything to Writer’s Work. They are not a place to go if you are looking to hire a writer. All their actual job content comes from somewhere else. And that makes me a lot less interested in them.

It also makes me wonder how they can possibly live up to all the wonderful things they promised in their videos, like jobs that pay a minimum of $100 and all the connections they said they had with people looking for writers.

So I would say I am about halfway convinced to cancel my account and get my $47 back. I mean, WTF do I need these people for again?

But they still offer services like a word processor that tracks how long I work on a project so that I can correctly bill the client on hourly jobs, and 24 hour support for technical questions, and so forth and so on.

So I am not leaving yet but boy am I unimpressed.

UpWork was never like that. Maybe I should just get over my aversion to going back due to how badly I flamed out on three different jobs, and go back there.

I will think about it.

Oh, life update : my money safely made it to my reloadable credit card. I currently have $460 sitting there waiting to be spent.

It’s a good feeling.

Having that cash there makes me feel more secure and safe, like it’s a shield against the toil and tribulations of life.

I have to make sure that I don’t fall into the Miser’s Paradox, though. That’s what I call it when having the money becomes more important than spending it.

It’s a form of hoarding, basically, and one I could easily see myself falling prey to. The feeling of security I get from having the money is very seductive, and if I don’t watch myself carefully, I could end up in the absurd position of having a sizable amount of money that I am psychologically incapable of spending.

So, no Scrooge I. That money will get spent. I will, of course, do my best to spend it wisely on things that will actually make my life better, but Mammon as my witness, it will get spent on stuff.

Possibly on a new computer chair, like I mentioned before.

Where was I? Baby steps, right. I originally planned to apply for that job I’ve been talking about today, but it turns out that they want both a resume and a portfolio, and I don’t have either.

Well, I have my portfolio on Writer’s Work’s website. I am not happy with it, but it’s there. That might be enough.

But I sure as shit don’t have a resume. The very word sends chills through me because that is always where I fail because I don’t have job experience and there are huge time gaps I can’t explain except my saying I’ve been suffering from depression, and why would anyone want to hire someone who gets sick for that long?

I much prefer the world of UpWork, where all that matters is the quality of your work. The only important question is whether or not I can do the work, and I can.

So maybe I will end up back on UpWork after all.

Then I will just have to explain why I haven’t done any work there for years.

It never ends.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been pondering my profound mistrust of life today.

Because I realized that on some level and in some way, my mind is constantly working hard to see problems coming so I can control outcomes and keep all the bad things of the world from hurting me.

On paper, that sounds relatively normal. But when you add just how deep my mistrust of the world goes, it quickly jumps the rails into complete and utter madness.

Because without some kind of baseline of trust, there is no limit as to the scope and depth of my paranoia. There is no point at which I can say “beyond this point, I don’t have to worry”. I worry about everything all the time, or rather, I worry about everything I can think of all the time.

And then I worry that I can’t think of enough things and the ones I am not covering are the ones that are going to get me.

Most of this is subconscious. If I think about it, I am aware that it is happening, and on a good day, I might even be able to influence the process and apply the only solution that works – hard logic – in order to create breathing space for myself.

But for the most part, it all happens under the hood, on its own, and the only part that is conscious is the constant anxiety and concern I feel even when I am home, in my room, typing away on my computer.

And that’s as safe as it gets in my life.

Fundamentally, this is a very diseased way to live. All that computation drains my mental resources and saps my motivation. It’s a very “expensive” program to leave running all the time in my subsurface consciousness, and yet I literally cannot imagine life without it there.

As absurd and costly as it is, it is the only thing that I know of that can give me the feeling of control over events that I need because of anxiety it itself creates.

Rather efficient, that.

If I could, I would turn the whole thing off. But I would have to address my fundamental profound lack of trust in the world and that is trickier even than it sounds.

This “permanently unsafe” thing has roots deep, deep into my mind. It’s been a constant ever since I was raped by a stranger at the age of 4 and no amount of reasonable reasoning is going to fix it.

I don’t know how to make that scared little animal inside me feel safe. It wants there to be someone warm and strong and trustworthy for it to follow, but it is so afrad of getting hurt again that it doubts such a person actually exists.

This is what happens when you had a deeply emotionally neglected childhood where you also happen to be smarter than most of the people trying to help you.

I have never known a greater power than myself who was smart enough and strong enough to make me feel like they could do all the worrying for me and I could trust enough to relax and stop worrying.

And kids need there to be someone like that. And usually there is in the form of teachers and parents and so on who are smarter than the kid, know more about the world than the kid, and have that reassuring strength that makes the kid feel like everything is going to be okay.

I have never in my life felt like everything was going to be okay. I know too much, I see too much, and I am all too familiar with the darkness of the world to think that I could ever reach a state where I have any kind of faith that things will work out for the best.

On what would such faith even be based? I have no omnipotent father figure to trust with my fate. There is certainly no human being who could or would take charge of my destiny and my wellbeing so I could finally relax and feel safe.

I don’t think I am capable of even one tenth of that level of trust.

I don’t even trust the people I know love me and want the absolute best for me. Not that I think they are all plotting against me or anything, or that nobody actually loves me.

But they don’t see things the way I do. With the best intentions in the world, I know they will miss things I see coming a mile away, and in general not be as good at looking out for me as I am.

That’s a terrible thing because it means I am all alone in this world. There is nobody I would even trust to have my back in an emergency, and that’s just plain wrong.

Nobody currently in my life has done anything to warrant such distrust. They don’t have to. This is not about reasonable emotions.

This is about out of control madness, the kind that comes from deep inside your mind and floods all the spaces where input from reality should go.

So please don’t take this mistrust personally, loved ones. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with my own diseased mind.

You can see now how an inability to trust others coupled with a total lack of religion and a deep feeling that the universe is a cold and hostiles place can create a person who is deeply parnoid at all times.

And the worst part is that no matter how smart I am and no matter how paranoid I get, bad shit will happen anyway. Because there is always a limit to how much you can control outcomes. That’s the real limit to paranoia.

Then you have to ask how much this prevention program costs versus how much good it actually does me. Cost/benefit analysis, in other words.

And I am pretty sure the cost vastly outstrips the benefit.

But the question remains : how the hell do I shut it down?

I don’t have the answer. But I know one thing.

The answer will be in the form of emotion – not words.

So it might just take me a long time to find.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, it’s Saturday night, I’m blogging, I got food on the way, I got the fan pointed at my fever’d brow, and all is right in the world.

More or less.

Tonight’s title refers to experience I just had dealing with my own compulsions.

See, I was all set to get my beloved Lamb Rogan Josh from the Tandoori King Cafe when I got to the end of the process and saw that ordering $15 worth of food was going to cost me $27.

Talk about sticker shock. And yet, I ordered the exact same dish at the exact same price before and had no problem with it.

So what changed?

Me, basically. See I have been ordering exclusively from places that offer free delivery on orders over $20 lately, and that has radically rearranged my since of how much I expect to get for my money.

So what was a perfectly acceptable price before is now too much.

Ahhhh, now it makes sense. Do you like my guru-style trickery?

So I ordered my usual from the Kingswood Pub instead. That consists of their beef dip sandwich (so good), with fries and gravy, plus their pita and vegetable platter.

It adds up to just over $20 and thus qualifies me for free delivery. Then I do my little bit of mathemagic to make it come out to $25 even, and a very nice meal is on its way.

The website said. “We received your order, but it’s going to take a litle more time than usual ” as usual.

Fine. I pretty much expect to wait $45 for whatever I order. It’s no big deal, I mean, I am busy blogging anyhow.

Just gives me more time to finish my blogging before the food comes.

I like to turn it into a little race, just for fun.

On the career front, I officially launched myself on Writer’s Work today. Unlikely anything will come of it – all it turned out to be was some kind of “Hello” message that goes… um. somewhere… and not the rebirthing/decloaking ceremony I had hoped for.

Now, I have the job listings open in another tab and I am in the process of building up the nerve (or gall, or wherewithal, or whatever) to dive in and start looking for work.

It’s harder than it sounds. I have to climb over a lot of rocky outcroppings of self-loathing , lack of confidence in myself, and the strong urge to flee in order to do it.

Every depressive fights a silent war every moment of every day. It might seem like we’re doing nothing, or wasting our lives playing video games (ahem), or whatever, but that’s only because our inner struggles take up so much of our energy and time that we have little left for such frivolities as actually dealing with the world outside our skulls.

It’s so much more than feeling sad.

So I know going into it that I will have to struggle to get past all the jobs that intimidate me and make me feel small and weak and pathetic because they are way beyond my capacities, and stay in the game long enough to find the kind of creative writing for which I am actually qualified and can actually do.

I am feeling fluttery and nervous just thinking about it.

But it WILL be done. I am determined to make that happen, and I am one stubborn motherfucker, so it will take much more than my usual psychological horrors to stop me.

I’m getting tired of their act anyhow. I know they are full of shit. They know they are full of shit. Their antics have grown stale and uninspired and I am more than ready to just leave the theater and get the fuck on with my life.

I just have to crawl over their corpses to do it. Fine by me.

Look, not all of my metaphors are cute.

Somewhere on that site, there is a job with my name on it. Something I can grab and run with and knock people’s socks off with how creative and fresh and inspired my approach to the task is and how delightful reading me can be.

Because I am an amazing writer. It’s (literally) crazy how often I have to remind myself of that. Many people over the years have told me how goddamned funny my writing is, and that has to be something you can take to the bank.

Speaking of which.

Get this : so I cashed my $520 check yesterday, and deposited $450 onto my reloadable visa for future spending online.

Fast forward to last night, where, on a whim, I decided I wanted to see that nice fat balance on my card, so I go to check it online.

Only to see there is only $10 on the card. Um, WTF???

Once the panic dulled down, I checked my checking account, and thank goodness, it shows the check cashing and the paying of the “bill” that is the $450 going to my reloadable visa card.

So I know that it didn’t disappear into a black hole or anything. There is a “paper trail” to follow. It’s just that for some reason, the money is hung up somewhere between my bank and my reloadable visa.

I suspect the weekend is part of it. As insane and inane as it sounds in this day and age, there are still banking transactions that, despite being entirely electronic. still can’t happen on the weekend.

So I am not freaking out. Not yet. I expect that this will all resolve itself on Monday.

But if it doesn’t, there better be a pretty damned good explanation or I am going to rain calm, polite Canadian hell on people till I get my goddamned money.

I don’t care whose fault it is. I don’t care that the reloadble visa is actually run by someone other than Vancity. I don’t care if my case is not someone’s job or if that is not their department. I don’t care if someone is having a bad day or “just can’t” right now.

I will lean on whoever I can get hold of and refuse to let up until they send me to someone who can actually help.

Because while I am not a materialistic person per se, I am a Taurus, and we have very strong deep feelings about our money.

And God, the Devil, and Vishnu’s older sister can’t save whoever thinks to deny it to us.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The mighty check of $520 has been cashed!

I put $450 of it on my reloadable visa, where it can await my decision on what the heck I want to do with it.

The possibilities are tantalizing.

And I kept the rest to augment my cash supply. This ended up being spent at Pricemart on mini pot pies and burritos, plus cab fare.

Yes, I took a cab both THERE and BACK. Such decadence!

They didn’t have the mini pot pies I like. The Swason ones, which you purchase individually. Perfect for lonely, hungry singles like me.

But they were nowhere to be found. Instead, they had the usual kind you can buy in bulk, plus some super fancy ones that were $8 each.

They were quite big, though. The size of a large dessert plate. So they would definitely feed more than one normal person of human appetites.

Me, I would have no problem finishing one by myself.

But $8 is a lot to pay for a pot pie, even one that is big and hearty. Still, they have a fancy French name, and if they are half as good as the French (Canadian) pot pies I have had, they are worth the price.

So who knows. Some day I might splurge and give one a shot.

Like the average Taurus, I am inherently frugal, but I will spend a lot on things that I think are worth it when that’s an option.

And truly excellent pot pie is something that could potentially inspire fervert and worshipful loyalty in me.

Instead, I ended up with pot pies roughly the size of half a lemon, and so I had to make two of them in order to feel fulfilled.

And even then, I don’t think they quite hit the spot. It might take three to really satisy me. Which means they won’t last real long.

Oh well, now I know why they were four bucks cheaper than the same amount of Schneider pot pies.

Because they’re tiny!

I’d say they are appetizier sized. Not good for hors d’ouvres, though. Too hard to eat with your hands.

But they would make a fabulous course to go right before the entree. Get people’s stomachs revved up for the main course by giving them something small and savoury and substantial.

I got 6 chicken pot pies and 6 beef. Should make for three to five more meals.

Then there’s the burritos. I got 8 of them for 6 bucks. Elementary mathematics tell us that means they were 75 centrs each, which is about what I would pay for them at Taco Bell down in the USA.

I am a tiny bit annoyed with myself because I thought I had grabbed the Chicken and Rice burritos, but I got the Beef and Bean instead.

I’ve never had Chicken and Rice burritos and they sounded very good to me, not to mention being a little more “summer-y”.

My appetite tends to swing more towards chicken than beef in the summer. And towards lighter foods in general.

Not sure why. Sounds vaguely evolutuionary. Like somewhere in my programming is a line of code that says birds are plentiful in the summer, so you save your beef and pork for winter months.

Or maybe I am reading too much into things. Who knows.

Feeling pretty good today. Money will do that to a fella. So will getting out of the house on a gorgeous sunny summer day, even if all I did was get in and out of cabs.

I actually considered taking the bus not to save money (bus pass = free) but so that I would spend more time out in the sunshine and warm weather.

A crazy notion by my usual form of indolent reasoning, but probably the sort of thing I should actually listen to more often because it actually would lead to a healthier, happier, calmber and more balanced me.

It’s hard to get better when your instincts are all wrong.

Very close to launching my Writer’s Work career. I added a bunch of stuff to my portfolio. It’s not formatted the way I want and I want to add a few more things, so I am not quite ready for ignition yet.

But I will fix all that soon and will then rocket myself into the world of well paid freelance writers who can actually make a living at it.

Dare to dream.

One microscopic downside to getting the $520 – it is really making figuring out what I want for my birthday more complicated.

Why? Because it’s hard enough for me to figure out what I actually want. Now I have to figure out whether I want to ask for it or buy it myself!

I will probably buy the tablet myself. I thought about springing for a laptop. but ultimately decided that I liked the portability and ease of us of a tablet.

Then again, the great thing about a laptop is that I can type on it.

Typing on a tablet is entirely possible, but kind of sucks. Like a lot of writers, I am a creature of habit, and I need a full sized keyboard and a full sized monitor in order to feel comfortable getting my word on.

Or should it be getting my words on?

Writing, is what I’m saying.

I am also contemplating finally buying a current. AAA. popular game. But there is no rush on that. Shadow of War (two years old) and Slay the Spire (this year) are keeping me busy, and when I finish those, I still have that Assassin’s Creed game set in revolutionary Paris to play.

Assuming I can get the frigging controls working.

So what I am saying is that I got options, but I am good for now. I have been lazily poking around Steam to see what’s new but I feel no need to rush into anything.

It’s not like there is a new Dishonored or Witcher game out there for me.

Actually…. I should probably go check.

Close the door on the way out, OK?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ah, the eternal (or rather, annual) question, what the heck do I want for my birthday?

It’s a very hard question for me to answer. For one, it’s just soo damned broad. There’s millions if not billions of possible answers. Ergo it is not the sort of question that can be answered by carefully considering all the possibilities.

I mean, I’m bright, but I’m not THAT bright. I can’t handle that level of computation.

The other side of the question is just as problematic because it asks what I want, and I have a lot of trouble with that question.

I have spent so long in a position of both real and imagined powerlessness that my actual desires are buried so deep you couldn’t find them with both hands and a Geiger counter. At some point I learned to just tune out that kind of thing.

I mean, if you are powerless to fulfill your desires, then all they can do is torment you and frustrate you. So why not just ignore them?

Because it makes you die inside, for one. But let’s not go there right now.

Complications aside, what the fuck DO I want?

A better tablet, for one. The one I have now is quite old by modern device standards. It’s slow and clunky and can’t run the latest versions of the Android operating system so it can’t run a lot of modern apps.

That means the bar for “better” is pretty low. I would be perfectly happy with someone’s used tablet as long as it was made within the last 4 or 5 years.

New would, of course, be better, mostly because the battery with last longer that way.

A better office chair to sit upon when I use this computer would be nice too. The one I have now gets the job done, but I would love to get something more ergonomic, with better back support and a nice thick study cushion for my great big butt.

I vaguely recall Ray mentioning an office chair designed specifically for fat dudes once. I wonder if that’s still a thing.

Of course, what I really want more than anything in the world is to go home to Summerside, Prince Edward Island for a couple of weeks this summer. I really miss my family and I worry that I won’t get to see my mother before she passes, and in general I feel a deep need to go back to the wellspring of my being for renewal.

And this time I would force myself to go to the house I grew up in and get the heck over its loss already.

But it’s crazy expensive to get from here to there. There’s kind of 90 percent of Canada in the way. We are talking at least $1000.

And that price is not negotiable, because the cheaper a method of travel is, the more nights you will spend in transit and therefore will need a hotel room for.

Flying is actually the cheapest way to go, at least according to the research I did last time I went home, which admittedly was 15 years ago.

That’s enough brain cudgeling for now.

End part 1!

---

Begin part II!

So the trip home is out. I just looked it up and the air ticket alone would be $670 and that would only get me as far as Halifax. I would have to find a shuttle to get me from Halifax to good old Summerside.

Plus accomodations, plus food, plus in-flight entertainment (hello crosswords!), and so forth and so on.

Still, that’s not quite as crazy as I thought it would be. Maybe I will save up for it or something. It might be more doable than I imagined.

There is the small problem of my claustrophobia. As I understand it, seats have only gotten smaller since the last time I made this trip, and I was very closing to freaking out back then. I can’t imagine I would very well today.

Once more, my clastrophobia fucks up my life.

Anyhow, that financial goal is more in reach than you might normally think because today something very wonderful arrived for me in the mail.

A check from the federal government for $520!

It covers a whole bunch of GST checks that never made it to me because of not doing my taxes for a few years due to reasons that are as complicated as they are stupid.

And I am not sure what to do with it, but using it as a down payment on a trip home sounds pretty good to me right now.

Plus, I am in the process of signing up as a freelance writer for a website called Writers Work, and I might get work through it. Their sales video convinced me to part with $47 of my money for a membership, so you know that they at least promise someting pretty good. I don’t part with my dough easily.

But according to them, the jobs they arrange start at 100 bucks and go up from there, so the potential income is substantial.

Still, I would not have parted with my money if they were not offering a 30 day money back guarantee. I figure if they haven’t made me at least $47 by the end of 30 days, they were full of crap anyway and I will get the money back then.

But if they can back up the hype at all, then I should have no problem making the membership fee back.

And the best thing is that they do not take a cut of my earnings. That $47 is all I will ever have to pay them for the rest of my life.

That definitely puts them way ahead of Upwork, who took 25 percent.

So things are looking up on that front. I haven’t quite launched myself on Writer’s Work yet – I want to put more things into my portfolio first.

Once that is done, I will launch myself into this new world of freelance writing, win clients over with my combination of talent and charm, and hopefully one day even be able to support myself with my freelancing.

Or at least be able to buy the occasional AAA brand-new game.

I just want to earn money again, dammit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.