Patient readers know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that in these blog entries, I rarely end up at my original intended destination.

Take yesterday’s blog entry. Please!

Clearly, I started off talking about the world outside my well lit playground of a mind and then suddenly switched to this whole elaborate thought experiment where I wonder what my life would have been like if I had not been raped at the age of 4.

I assume you wonderful people who read this thing are used to that by now.

But I would not blame someone for finding it frustrating, especially if they were interested in the first idea and want to see where I was going with it.

If so, I am truly sorry. But it’s unlikely to change any time soon.

I do how I do because it’s all I can do.

I have, however, figured out why and how it happens,and that’s progress of a sort.

Deploy the elaborate metaphor!

It’s as though all the thoughts and feelings I need to express are in a huge stack, and the stack, unsurprisingly,. is not that well organized.

Related ideas are sometimes found stacked together, but sometimes as I take thoughts anjd ideas off the stack and express them, the next thing in the stack is something completely unrelated and I have to express that before I can do anything else.

It’s all very linear, isn’t it? Maybe people waiting in line would be a better metaphor.

Oh well, whatever and ever, amen.

I can fight this effect to a certain event. I can stick the unrelated thought on a shelf and try to get back to my original point. It can be done.

But it’s very hard on me, both mentally and emotionally. That unrelated thing from the stack really wants to get expressed. In fact, it has probably waited in the stack (line?) for a very long time and now that it’s finally made it, it does not want to wait another second for its final apotheosis.

Damn I love that word.

It is far more natural, normal, and easy for me to simply express this new notion and take it as far as it goes while abandoning the previous one.

Like all creative types, I follow the connections between things. But due to the nature of the stack, sometimes those connections are, shall we say, highly idiosyncratic to myself.

In other words, they only make sense to me. If you’re lucky.

Sometimes even I don’t know how I got from Topic A to Topic B. All I can do is trust that in my mind at least, there’s a connection.

Even if the only real connection is that they were together in my stack.

Part of it is simply the nature of this blog. Its main purpose is to provide me an outlet for all those thoughts, emotions, and ideas that are piled up in my head waiting to be expressed. The more of them I can express, the better I feel, because I have finally freed up the mental bandwidth that thought etc was taking up in my mind and that leaves more bandwidth free for use in important tasks.

Like, for instance, mood stabilization.

I suppose that’s what makes me a writer. All those things waiting in line to be expressed. Presumably, in a sane non-writer’s mind, those things simply don’t get generated, or if they do, they just get deleted afterwards.

Not so with me. I hold on to each and every single one of them. They all go on the stack. And that stack is very, very tall.

Dammit, I should have gone with people waiting in line. A very long line of people waiting for something is way easier to visualize than a stack a mile high.

Oh well, too late now.

And it’s not all bad. That stack of notions is mighty handy to have because it means I always have a ton of creative ideas at hand.

I am never at a loss for something that needs expressing.

And I think the sheer pressure of the stack – its weight, in a sense – provides the energy that fuels my boundless creativity.

Like it’s some kind of deep geothermal process happening deep underground and I am the lucky fellow who gets to tap into it.

In theory, at least. It can be hard to harness for useful purposes.

Volcanism is a harsh mistress. The fires of creation run very, very hot and glow very, very bright, and it takes a special kind of person to be able to survive the light and heat long enough to use them to create something new.

It helps to be a little bit dead inside. Hence the well known relationship between creativity and mental illness.

Like I keep saying, there has to be something wrong with you if you want to be a writer.

Normal people can express themselves in other ways.

But we writer types can only do it with words. And putting things into words is not easy. If other avenues of expression were open to us, we’d use those.

But for whatever reason, the normal avenues of expression are closed off to us and so we have to put it into words, and that requires learning to write.

And writing is a strange and difficult activity. If there wasn’t an urgent need pressuring us to do it, we would not bother.

That’s one of the reasons the one thing I tell people about writing is that writers write. If you want to be a writer, write things. That’s the one and only qualification, but it can’t be waived, skipped over, or bypassed.

It sounds almost insultingly obvious, but you would be surprised at how many miss this because they like the idea of being a writer but not the work.

So they content themselves with planning to write, thinking about what they would like to write some day, talk endlessly about their brilliant ideas, and never get around to actually writing anything.

I feel like wanting to get the feeling of things without putting in the work is a phenomenon that runs through modern society down to its very roots, but that is a topic for another time.

Now what was it I planned on talking about?

Oh right, why I wander off topic so much.

Looks like it happened again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pretty nifty title, eh?

I am speaking, of course, of the real world. As much as my overdeveloped cold circuit would like to believe otherwise, there is far more to this world than the things that make sense and fit together in a way that is pleasing to the rational mind.

And now that I know this, I can’t go back to pretending that my magnificent mind, as amazing and powerful as it is, is all I need to cope with life.

It’s a hell of a hammer but life ain’t all nails.

I feel lke in order to learn to expand my mind and soul beyond the straightjacket of reason and logic, I am going to have to go way, way back in my development as a human being and try to find that part of me that was ready to learn about the world in its own terms, without presuppositions and pre-formed structures to fit things in.

In other words, I need to access the person I was before I was raped.

At the age of 4.

Like I said…. way, way back.

And this goes beyond merely remembering what a happy and adorable kid I was before my world was shattered by a stranger’s cock. It is helpful to remember that, as long ago as it was, there was a time before I was an emotional cripple, but it is more important that I dig back to that time and find where I left off in my emotional development.

And once I find it, start that sucker up again. I both want and need to finally grow up and become a real, fully developed, healthy individual, and the key is my early childhood.

To that end, let’s play What If I Hadn’t Been Raped?

It’s a fun game.

Without that world shattering penis entering my life (and my body) I would have continued being the same happy little smartassed kid I was beforehand. I would still be too smart for my own good, but perhaps not quite as ultra-bright because I am no longer a socially isolated loner who spends all his copious free time in class thinking about stuff and developing his reasoning mind.

So I probably would have been a good student, assuming they could get me to slow down and pay attention and do the work.

There’s a bit of a question mark besides that because I am naturally willful and fiercely independent, so I might have had the usual sorts of disciplinary issues us smart times get into when we are young and school is boring us to tears.

I would like to say that I would have gotten into kindergarten if the rape hadn’t happened, but I can’t. That was a re-rape healthy me that was a smug little asshole when they were testing me.

They were asking me questions I found insultingly easy and I was stuck between being affronted at the very notion that I might not know these things and being vastly amused at how stupid the whole thing was.

I can’t imagine that being any different in this alternate scenario.

Fast forward to Grade 1. I presumably would have gone through the same arc of being initially popular and getting along great with my fellow students, although given my lack of kindergarten, I might have burned some bridges by being sarcastic and dismissive with my fellow students.

And, to be honest, probably the teachers too.

But at least in this scenario, I would not also be pathetically emotionall dependent on them because I don’t connect with my fellow students.

So then would come the challenge by that little shit Trevor. The one who got the rest of the kids calling me fat and laughing at me in a way that my lack of social development left me entirely unable to handle.

And that’s when I shut down, withdrew, and became the reclusive misfit who was both way ahead and way behind my fellow students.

That’s the real world. I am thinking that knowing how stubborn and combative I am by nature, it would have gone radically different in our alternate timeline.

I probably would have ending up in a fight with him, to be honest. If it escalated that far. I sure as hell wouldn’t take it numbly and dumbly like I did in the real world.

I told you there would be behavioural issues. In this timeline, I am certainly no angel. The best you can say about me is that I would always mean well.

That brings me to the ticklish issue of what exactly I would be like if there wasn’t a mass of psychological scar tissue passively restraining my sarcastic and combative nature.

I am fairly certain I would have straightened myself out eventually, and come to the decision that I wanted to learn and get through school and so I would then choose to behave myself and do what I am told.

But getting there might have been rough. Without all that depression and social isolation, there would be little keeping me from reacting to elementary school the same way as I reacted to the testing for kindergarten : affronted, smug, and sarcastic.

So it might have taken me a while to get around to deciding that it was worthwhile to play nice and cooperate with the grownups even when they seem like idiots to me.

Again, not an angel.

I have to admit, this version of me amuses me. I can’t help but imagine him as being a lot like my character Sam, the too smart for his own good kid I created for my Writing for Animation class and took through various stages of my VFS education.

And like Sam, he would be clueless enough to say what he thinks most of the time, but he would not be doing it nearly as innocently.

Sam says what he says because he doesn’t know any better.

This other version of me would be doing it because he found it hilarious and was in love with his own wit and cleverness.

Yep….. definitely not an angel.

But I can’t help but love him anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow..

Fad diets fascinate me because they are a perfect example of applied magical thinking

Because the real diet is the one you follow that has nothing to do with whatever the fad diet is about.

Let’s take avacados. Let’s presume the latest thing is The Avocado Diet. Plausible, yes?

What the people behind the diet will tell you is that by eating avocados, you can make the pounds melt away!

And they are right…. if you follow the entire Avacado Diet.

And you know what the rest of the diet says? What every diet says. Eat these healthy foods more, those unhealhy ones less, and maybe get some exercise.

You know…. to make sure you “activate” the avocados’ full “fat-melting power”/

The avocados bring nothing to the process in and of themselves. They are merely the talisman for people to fixate upon in order to make doing the things we all know lead to weight loss – diet and exercise – a lot easier.

Thus, it bypasses the need for the motivation to make sacrifices for one’s own betterment – a cold and abstract motivation even at the best of times – with something far more direct and real – making the magic work.

So to speak.

I am sure the Placebo Effect helps too. If they believe the avocados work, they will. Ergo the proponents will have no problem getting as many glowing testimonials from thinner, happier people as they want.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. They did the diet and lost weight, ergo the diet works. The fact that the avocados had little to do with it is irrelevent. These people will believe in that diet until the day they die.

Religion works similarly.

And as a humanist, I want whatever makes people healthier. Even if it’s something that is obvious bunk to us clever types.

It could be the Voodoo Diet for all I care, as long as it does more good than harm.

So now you know how fad diets work!

---

Did you enjoy that? I have thoughts like that all the time. There is a lot of the world I can explain with comparable ease and I have to think there must be a market for that.

Maybe I should start my own Wiki and fill it with my explanations for things and then promote it as the wiki for people who want to know how things work.

No, that sounds too much like I am going to be explaining how your toaster works. Which I could totally do, of course.

I mean, it ain’t rocket science.

But I was thinking of more abstract things. Like explaining how the capital city corrupts politicians and turns them into terrible people, why the rich are evil, what the deal is with people who have sex with the lights out, and so forth and so on.

Honestly, what I really want is an advice colum, like Dan Savage has.

Only, ya know…. nice.

I figure if I have this gift for knowing and explaining how many things which seem to make no sense have simple, understandable explanations, I should use it for the betterment of both humanity and my bank account.

Obviously, were I to be doing this for a syndicated column or even just for a wider audience, I would hone my ability to get to the point faster and eliminate as much non-informational content as I could.

The above explanation of fad diets was just a test of the basic idea of trying to write down these explanations of mine and see how they look on the page.

Were I writing for pay, I would work on it till it meets my standards, which are high.

But this is my blog, and I use my blog as my judgement free scratch pad where I don’t have to judge my words or imagine how they would look to a reader. Here, the most important thing is to express what is in my head and thus reduce the pressure of all those words building up in my head.

And with every thought I put down here, my mind gets a little clearer, a little happier, and a little bit less cramped.

And that is why I have such love for you, my gentle readers. You read this despite the fact that it is not written with entertainment in mind, and I adore you for that.

So consider yourself thanked once again, Nice People.

You make this whole thing possible.

---

Moodwise, things are meh. I am still struggling to defuse the bomb of harsh self-judgment that keeps me from acting on my ambitions or even just my desires.

At some point, I rigged myself to explode if I ever stepped out of my tiny safe place, and now it is up to me to thread my way through my own defenses in order to be free.

Or maybe all this talk of defusing myself is just my depression finding a way to get me all tangled up in problem solving and buying into the whole mystery of the process so that I will not discover the simple, easy solution that is right in front of my face.

A lot of the tales of enlightenment I have read end with the hero learning that the answer they seek is something they have known all along, or something else that seems absurdly obvious once you get there.

But patient readers know things are never that simple. The seemingly obvious revelation is merely the end of a long process in which you clear the way for the revelation by doing the emotional work you need to do to clear your mind and let that simple explanation occur to you and make your life better.

So maybe my depression is creating mazes for me to explore in order to keep me occupied just like the avocados keeps people fixated while they diet.

I suppose we all need a little magical thinking in our life.

Some of us just need a more complex kind of spell.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The words are : bleh, urgh, and gaaah.

Bad sleep, feel squished flat, dizzy, disoriented, and so on. The usual.

Makes the words difficult to come up with. But I have to get at least half the words down before I can go back to sleep.;

Plus I’ve got to eat my lunch., Woke up with a very full bladder and a very empty stomach, and I am not going to be able to sleep till I fix both conditions.

And I already emptied my bladder. Took forever. Aging sucks.

Come on, Diet Coke, work your caffinated miracle of rebirth on me!

I’ve never been abkle to fully rely on caffiene. Sometimes it helps me wake up and sometimes it doesn’t do a thing for me and sometimes it only makes things worse.

Diet Coke is awful tasty, though. So I stick with it.

God, I feel awful. I wonder if this is what a hangover feels like? I’ve never had one. As superpowers go, it’s pretty minor.

“Oh no. the Avengers partied too hearty last night and they are all too hung over to fight Thanos and his minions!”

“I’m not!” I say in my best impressive Gary Cole voice.

“Great, what superpowers do you have?

“Um…. that was it. I don’t get hangovers. ”

“And you’re an Avenger? That’s pathetic. ”

“True. And yet, I am also getting my own Netflix series plus a whole trilogy of movies starring the ghost of Dom Deluise. ”

I hope he plays me sympathetically.

But remember, you can’t spell sympathetic without pathetic!

I eye my long dormant CPAP machine, and ponder my limitations as a patient. or as a sick person, depending on how you lookj at it.

I can get some things done, like taking pills and keeping sugar out of my diet, but I don’t test my blood sugars, I don’t take my insulin, and I don’t cut down on my carbs.

I just limp gamely through the days, trudging fatalistically towards my early grave with all the mindless persistence of gravity.

I know that I don’t take care of myself like I shoud. Like it’s not even close. The best thing I can say is that I do the best that I can and that I am grateful for all the bad habits I don’t have, like drinking or smoking or eating high cholesterol foods.

That’s a pretty sad list of health virtues. The equivalent of having it be that your best asset as marriage material is that you are STD free.

80 words to go before I can rest. Hang in there, Bertrand, you can do it!

Tonight, Le Gang and I will be going to Denny’s for dinner, like we always do on non-FRED Sundays. Dunno why people look down on Denny’s. It has to be pure snobbery. People wnating to reassure themselves and others that they are “too good” for Denny’s.

Fine by me. Stay away in droves, it will make the place quieter for we who are not unincumbered by irrational prejudices.

That’s 500ish. Time to nap!

---

It’s 5 pm, I’m back, and I’m feeling practically human.

There’s still some stubborn fog clinging to my brain and my veins but I have had a good couple of naps (it’s complicated) and now I feel downright sentient.

What a difference an afternoon makes.

I am truly getting sick of feeling like shit for three or four hours a day, though. Like I have been saying lately, that was the whole reason I stopped taking the sleeping pills in the first place.

Well, the first time was because I ran out. But then I noticed that I still got some pretty good sleep so I said, “Fuck the pills, I can do without!”.

But I can’t. Not really.

I guess the real question is whether I am better off now than when I was skipping them.

Scientifically speaking, it’s hard to see how I could not be. I am sleeping for longer stretches and getting deeper into the all important stage 4 sleep, where all the truly important stuff in renewing both body and brain takes place.

I suspect it’s also the stage which resets your stress level to zero, which is, ya know, kind of important.

On the other hand, I think the reason that pill induced sleep messes me up so bad is because it’s so apnic. My sleep apnea is acutely worse when the pill is keeping me asleep, and so at the same time that I am getting deeper sleep, I am also getting smothered by my apnea.

So my choices are :

a) sleep badly and suffer from insufficient REM activity and have that weird shininess in my head grow and grow, displacing more and more of my conscious mind till I feel like the internal pressure is going to make my mind pop like a popcorn kernel and then I will go truly insane, or…

b) sleep deeply and get my REMs, but also get insufficient oxygen, which no doubt does widespread systemic damage to my entire body, just like my diabetes.

They could be twins.

I think the solution is that I need a better sleeping pill. Maybe there is one that doesn’t put me down quite so deep. I still have the mirtazapine Doctor Costin prescribed for me as a possible alternative to the questiapine, so maybe I will try that.

Though according to the WIkipedia article, mirtazapine is an antidepressant, not a sleeping aid, so I am not sure WTF Doctor Costin was thinking.

Then again, quetiapine isn’t a sleep aid either. It’s an atypical antipsychotic. So clearly my therapist does not seem to be fond of the listed functions of drugs.

Holy crap, trazadone isn’t listed as a sleep aid either. It is also listed an an antidepressant. Something weird is going on here.

Maybe drug companies are reluctant to list their drugs as indicated for multiple indications, and so they only list what would be considered the drug’s primary action and it’s up to the doctor’s grapevine to spread the other uses.

I don’t know. But I do know that I am gonna ask about it next session.

Meanwhile, I will try the mirtazapine and see if I like it’s terrible side effects any better.

I will keep you posted.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Wow, my order from Edo Japanese is only taking 16 minutes to get to me.

That’s almost too fast.

Anyhow, tonight’s subject is the extremely tricky question of how to build myself up despite my tendency to tear myself apart.

I have likened trying to rid myself of my self-destroying tendencies to trying to defuse a bomb before, and it’s an apt metaphor. I feel like I am trying to guide my self-worth through a minefield without setting any off.

Clearly, when the problem is this inricatr and intractable, a next-level solution is desired. Something that gets at, to over-extend the metaphor like I do, the people who put the fucking minefield there in the first place.

In other words, I am looking for the primary mechanism of my self-destruction so I can deal with the problem at its root.

The root is, of course, anger.

Anger directed inward. That’s a good definition of depression right there. It doesn’t cover everything about depression but it gets the main problem across beautifully.

I have a lot of rage in my bloodstream that never gets externalized. Instead, it attacks me from the inside, like my own internal predator. It takes out its frustration on me by destroying anything good inside me the moment it is born, and it is a master at impoding my self-worth, along with any other kind of stability I try to build for myself.

Obviously, then, my anger needs an outlet. For some people, that outlet manifests as a bad, cranky, irritable mood, but I don’t think that’s an option for me.

I am far too keenly self-aware for that. I can’t fool myself into thinking it is about something else and attacking someone on that, like I have seen so many people do.

I know what my emotions are, where they come from, and why they are there. That means I cannot dodge responsibility for how I express. If I throw a fit because I need to vent, I will feel bad for the damage I do to people because I know exactly what I am doing and why.

This is another reason why I think a capacity for self-delusion is absolutely necessary for the healthy functioning of a human mind. Fools like me who know more than is good for them end up depressed because they have no self-delusions to act like bandages for their mental wounds and therefore nothing ever heals.

No wonder I am so fucked up.

Back to anger. So I can’t deny responsibility for my actions based on emotional needs, therefore I will need to do something deliberate in order to deal with my rage.

Some day soon, I will do that super angry blog post that I have been sort of planning ever since therapy last Thursday.

I have it more or less planned out in my mind, but so far, I have been far too chickenshit to actually do it because I know the emotions it will evoke will be very unpleasant and I will likely end up extremely upset.

And that like…. sucks.

But I will have to pull the trigger on that soon. Another thing about knowing so much about myself is that I know it’s the right thing to do for me at this point in my recovery and so I will have to do it.

Soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe.

My other scheme for venting some of my sea of rage is to get involved in political discussions online. I am a passionate ideologue and very articulate, and I could make a pretty big splash with my unusual opinions and unique point of view.

I am not sure where to start, but that’s not really the issue. There are lots of places where I could make a splash. Like the Cracked forums, Reddit, various political blogger’s websites, hell the Fox News forums for as long as they would let me post before banning me for life.

I would consider that an honor.

The real issues is courage, I suppose. The courage to leave my comfort zone behind and commit to doing something with myself and all this power and potential at my command. The courage to take the responsibility that comes with that power.

I think that’s the real issue that keeps me from using my gifts. I am afraid of the responsibility that comes with that much power.

Quite frankly. that power scares the hell out of me. If I really think about what I am capable of, I get a rampant case of the heebie-jeebies.

And part of me wants to say “Fuck my overdeveloped sense of responsibility, I am going to put my voice out there as loud and hard as I can and the world can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut if they can’t handle it. ”

It;s a very seductive voice. I have so much suppressed id power (rage, lust, ambition…. ) that the idea of taking the leash off and letting my id roam free sounds very, very good to me right now. After all, why should I show more restraint that everyone else venting their opinions onto Internet forums? They aren’t holding back. Why should I?

Cue the ghost of Stan Lee saying “Because with great power come great responsibility!”

Aw, yer no fun.

But yes, that is true. But what if I can do more good in the world by being my bold and brassy self and destroying all the arguments of all the bad people than by keeping to myself and posting politely?

Don’t I have a responsibility to do that instead? Just like Spider-Man’s responsibility to fight crime with his extraordinary gifts?

I feel like I have been dodging the question of whether my gifts come with the responsibility to use them to improve the world for my entire life.

I don’t like to think about it. Which means it must be thought about. The greatest gains lie in the areas of greatest resistance, after all.

But maybe not today. That’s a topic for another blog post.

I swear, though, I will stop dodginjg the question soon!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I tried. I swear, I really tried. But life defeated me.

So I get this email telling me to check my inbox at Revenue Canada’s website. And immediately I am annoyed, because if they had something to tell me, why not just put that in the email and save some time?

But whatever. I decide today is the day I will deal with it, so I go to the website and try to log in, but I have forgotten my username and password.

I thought I had saved them to my Google Keep page, but nerp.

So I go to do the thing to get my username and passwork back, and it wants to know what I put as my total income on line 150 of my tax return.

And I don’t know these things. I know I should. But I don’t.

Luckily, I still had my Notice of Assessment lying around, so I got the figure off that and put it in. The website then told my my account was locked.

Oh right. That happened two or three years ago. I thought I knew what my username and password were, got it wrong three times, and it locked me out, apparently forever.

It told me that if I wanted my account access back, I had to call up a service rep and talk to them about it.

And that’s where everything stopped for a few years as I have a lot of trouble with the phone and using it to ask for things from strangers, and thus I fell into that particular gumption trap and stayed there for a few years.

This year, though, I really wanted that sweet sweet tax return money, and so I did my taxes online with TurboTax and was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn’t need to log on to my Revenue Canada account in order to file them any more.

Yay me. I was so happy that I did my 2017 taxes at the same time. In due time, two checks for $75 each showed up and were cashed and saved and spent.

But when the time came for April’s GST rebate check came, I got nothin’. Plus there is the small matter of all the GST checks I missed when I didn’t do my taxes for a while.

So I had been meaning to contact the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) anyhow to see if I could get my greedy paws on THAT money. The email from them was just the impetus for actually getting around to doing it.

Back to the plot : so I am locked out of my account. Bummer. And the CRA website has no way to contact their agents by web or by email (not secure enough I guess), so I had to fill out an online form with my phone number and wait for THEM to call ME.

Beats waiting on hold, I will give them that.

So I get the call and it’s a pleasant sounding fellow named Doug and I tell him about my access problem and thus begins the process of verifying my identity.

He asks for the usual – name, SIN, date of birth – and for that number from line 150 of my tax return, which I was lucky enough to have – but that’s not enough.

He wants to know the amount of my last GST check. Well seeing as that was two years and change ago, I have no frigging idea.

So then he wants my previous address. This is not the sort of information I normally retain. I can show you every place I ever lived – I can take you right to the front door. But the actual address is not stored in my brain.

But I cudgel my brain and come up with 8834 Francis Road, aka Nerdvana, aka the place I lived with Joe, Julian, and Ryan Hawe for like a decade before getting renevicted five or six years ago.

He tells me I am wrong.

I tell him I am sure that’s the right address. I don’t recall our apartment number, but that’s the address all right.

He says no it is not.

So then he wants the figure from line 150 for my 2017 taxes. And I don’t know it. And I don’t keep paper records, so I don’t have it.

I thought I had saved my information as a PDF of my tax return that TurboTax generates as part of their process. But for the life of me, I can’t find it. I went looked for it before I even kicked off this insane process, and could not find it.

At the very lease, there should be ones from many years ago in my backup of my old HD I still have on this computer. But nope. Not that I can find, anyhow.

And it’s not like I would have deleted the files. They take up a trivial amount of space and are, ya know, super important, so why would I?

I had to say goodbye to Doug , the tax rep, and now I am officially stymied. Without information I don’t have, I can’t access my CRA account and find out what the heck they wanted to tell me, let alone get my overdue GST money.

So the CRA are both telling me to check my CRA inbox and not letting me do so because I cannot answer their fucking riddles.

It’s a heck of a catch, that Catch-22.

I have not entirely given up. I have stopped conscious trying to crack the problem because I was getting super stressed out by the whole thing, but I have my subconscious mind grinding away at the problem and I am sure I will figure something out sooner or later.

Oh, one last thing – I felt very clever for thinking to try to find the info on my TurboTax account. After all, that’s where I had inputted it.

But ha ha, no, it won’t tell me that without my logging in to my CRA account either!

God damn it, life, next time use lube.

Hopefully, whatever the hell they wanted to tell me was neither urgent or dire, and so my inability to get their actual message won’t screw me further.

But I want my frigging money, damn it.

And by gosh I am gonna get it.

SO SAYETH THE FOX!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, okay, that covers a lot of ground. In fact, if interpreted broadly, be said to include absolutely everything in the universe except that tiny percentage of it that I actually do talk about in this space.

So let’s be specific : I want to talk about anger. Mine, specifically.

Actually, there are few things I want to talk about less but I am going to talk about in anyway because, as my therapist pointed out, I am not going to make much forward progress until I learn to vent that shit somewhere, somehow, sometimes.

So let’s start with a confession : I am a very angry person.

Boy did that feel weird to type.

But it’s true. I have enormous amounts of sheer rage backed up inside me and wrecking shit like a dog that can’t be left alone or it tries to eat the couch.

And I hate my rage. Which you have to admit is fucked up on a truly epic scale.

I hate it because I don’t want to have to deal with it and it’s ugly and viscious and does not fit with my self image at all.

Clearly, my self image needs to be updated to include all that anger, but for the life of me, I still can’t see how that is possible.

I don’t want to be an angry guy. I want to be a cool guy who is funny and witty and fun to be around. I want to be the kind of person people look forward to seeing. I want to be as awesome as I know how to be.

Anger just doesn’t fit into that picture.

So I feel like in order to truly integrate all that anger, I have to invent an entirely new vision of who I am. One that somehow combines all my charms with the possibility of anger on both a personal and a transpersonal level.

Transpersonal things are always way easier for me. Well, they do say that the Achilles heel of every INTJ is interpersonal relationships.

I have friends, he declares somewhat defensively.

Anyhow, back to anger. Integration into my self image is definitely the long term goal,. but in the more immediate sense, the trick is to somehow stick-handle the anger past all my issues and my shame in order to get the damn stuff out of my head and (presumably) onto the page.

Yes, that means this process will include you, dear readers.

Hey, if I could express my emotions in a normal way, I wouldn’t be a writer.

And I am beginning to see the outline of how I am going to vent as much as I can onto these pristine pages of mine. It’s a matter of thinking about the things that I am the most angry about and working myself into a ranty state of mind then letting rip on the page.

Hopefully, I will be able to release some of the negative energy that has been making me anxious and unstable for so long and be done with the stuff.

I don’t quite feel up to doing it right now.

But I will do it soon, trust me.

In fact, I am kind of looking forward to it.

END PART 1!

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THE BRILLIANT PLAN : Play Slay the Spire under 11 pm and then do part 2 of my blogging for the day.

THE FATAL FLAW : My getting super damned sleepy.

THE FORGOTTTEN DETAIL : I barely slept at all last night.

THE NECESSARY ADJUSTMENT : Starting ten minuites early.

THE FERVENT HOPE : That I finish before I fall asllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

Just kjdding folks.

But I really am running on next to no sleep. I had one of my attacks of sudden awakeness this morning. And it was a bad one. One moment I was at the rosy gates for the Land of Nod, the next I was so wound up it made my teeth hurt.

So after trying to fight it for a while, I got up and did stuff.

It’s happened before. It’s like whatever force normally restrains all my energies and suppresses all my ambitions and desires suddenly fails and a whole lot of frustrated energies suddenl flood my bloodstream and I have to get up.

And every time it happens, I tell myself the same thing : sooner or later, you are going to have to pay for this.

I guess that time is now.

Oh well, thus endeth my experiment in not taking my sleepy piil so that I won’t be fighting through the fog of sleepiness in therapy.

I mean, mission accomplished, I was alert and engaged during therapy,. but the idea was that I would sleep, just not in a medicated way.

Nerp. The main withdrawal symptom of not taking my Quetiapine was a total inability to sleep. Lesson learned.

The experimental result : Probably not worth it.

Of course, I could also go to bed earlier, and thereby leave enouigh time for me to full wake up before therapy.

But that ain’t gonna happen. I am a night owl. A day sleeper I go to sleep when the sun comes up and sleep the day away.

I am a shadow stalker. A creature of the night, who only feels at home in the world of ghosts and shadows and nameless mysteries.

But mostly I’m just a depressive fat dude with more brains and talent than he knows what to do with or has to strength and courage to use.

Somewhere, a monkey eyes the controls of the machine that he built and is now too terrified of to us, trying to work up the nerve to turn it on again.

Damn I am good at imagistic writing.

Felt pretty good today. Dunno if it was because I was hypo-manic or because I got some stuff off my chest during therapy.

Probably a bit of both.

Now my problem is that I want to take a nap but I also want to be up in less than an hour to watch stuff with Joe and Julian.

I will probably just doze for a bit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have no idea how healthy (or unhealthy) I am.

For example, I had a killer idea for a subject for the second half of this blog entry, and now I have forgotten it.

It will come back in time. I hope.

But mainly, what I am talking about is that I don’t know how to assess my own health because I have no concept of what is normal for other people.

The example that brought this to mind is that after getting up to make my supper. I experienced a period of dizziness and lightheadedness. Not one strong enough to make me stagger or otherwise overwhelm me, but that might simply be because I am used to it and therefore can relegate it to the back of my mind while I get on with things.

No matter what, I just keep going.

Now I dunno if that happens to other people on a regular basis. maybe that is perfectly normal for people when they have been sitting a while and get up too fast. Maybe it’s nothing to be worried about at all.

Either way, though, I dunno.

Part of the problem came when, all those years ago, I overcome my paralyzing hypocondria more or less by sheer force of will.

I got sick and tired of being sick and tired and I set out to conquer the damned thing by making myself eat and drink water and build myself back up while telling myself repeatedly that whatever the doctor says, I will believe them.

It seemed like the only sane escape route from hypervigilant hypochondria.

But I can see now that this transferred far too much of the authority and the responsibility for my health over to doctors who are, after all, only human.

And being only human,they can’t know about things I don’t tell them about. They can’t see into my life and say “No, that’s totally normal’ or “EMERGENCY ROOM NOW. ” or anything in between.

I have gotten both of those responses. Remind me to tell you about my carbunkle some time in the future.

Anyhow, no matter how awesome your doctor is, he or she cannot actually personally take charge of you healthy. Existentialism says that no matter what happens, we are the ones in control of our lives, and it’s true.

You might not have the power, but it’s always you making the decisions.

And that goes double for health. The doctor can only meet you part way. The rest is up to you, whether you feel you are up to the job or not.

Backtracking a bit, my point is that I probably overcompensated when I dragged myself out of hypochondria. I stopped paying attention to and monitoring my health because as far as I was concerned, after all I gone through with psychosomatic symptoms and nervous exhaustion and pretending to be sick so hard I got sick, all messages from my body were now considered so suspect as to be worse than useless and I learned to simply ignore them as a result.

That…. is BAD. If my body needs something or if something has gone terrible wrong, it can only tell me about it if I pick up the call, so to speak.

The thing is, though, that I truly do not know how to stop. The very idea of opening my mind to all the conflicting and confusing messages from my body feels like a descent into madness and chaos to me. I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know how one aquiires a sense of what is normal and what is alarming. I don’t even have an image of a “healthy me” to compare myself to.

As far as I know, I have always been kind of sick. I don’t even know what “healthy” feels like. Between my depression and my “nervous stomach” and my anxiety and all my other mental strangeness that has been with my since I was 4 year old, I don’t think I have had a single moment when I did not feel sick on some level.

And that… is also BAD. And presumably abnormal.

But then again, maybe what I am feeling is totally normal and it is only my neurotic nature that makes me call it illness.

The truth is, I just don’t know.

---

I am too intense for most people.

And I think that’s one of my problem with interpersonal relationships. I emote and evoke so hard that it burns people out over time.

And once they pass that burnout point, they want nothing to do with me. It doesn’t matter that I am as sweet and charming and funny as ever. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t changed one bit.

The person has changed, and what was once great they are now so sick of that they avoid dealing with me at all if they can help it.

Some of them must wonder what is wrong with them. But it’s like a diet of rich foods. Sure, they are delicious., but eating too much of them will make you ill and you will want nothing to do with them for a while.

I am that rich food.

And I know why. It comes from a deep feeling that nobody is listening and noboy cares and so on an emotional level, I am screaming at the top of my voice.

I have so much going on it my head that I can’t express the normal way so it has to come out via vividly expressing myself around others as hard as I can.

And again, that wears people out. And then they just don’t want to ever deal with me again. They are as averse to me as they would be if they were allergic to me.

And it doesn’t mean they hate me or think I suck. It just means I was too much for them.

And that’s a lot for me to think about. Part of me wants to learn to moderate my output and the other part of me wants to say “Fuck them if they can’t take my awesomeness. ‘

Somewhat between those two extremes, I may find peace.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And God am I ever sick of it. And it’s not even May yet. Things are going to get a hell of a lot worse for a very long time before they get better.

I officially hate Summer right now. Fuck it. Why can’t thigns stay cool and reasonable?

And kicker is that I keep making plans for my afternoons. Plans I should know are fatally flawed because they rest on the untenable assumpion that I will be awake and alive and aware at the time, and not, for instance, asleep, dead to the world, and dazed into a stupor by the temperature.

I think that my tendency to imagine I will do things in the afternoon is part not yet adapting to the new reality of afternoon heat, but mostly just another one of those tricks my depression usese to keep me from getting anywhere.

It’s simple, really. It’s just an advanced form of procastination. By punting everything to a time when part of me knows I will be incapacitated, I can preserve the feeling that I was totally going to do the thing without having to actually do the thing.

That little trick is behind most of procrastination. Preserving the idea that you will while knowing that you won’t and therefore getting the benefit (thinking you will) without the cost (actually doing the thing).

Without that little trick, you would have to actually face the fact that you will not do it later or at all. That there is no condition under which you would actually do the thing. All you will ever do is kick it into the future again.

It’s a very self-destrutive delusion and we would all be better off in the long run if we could rid ourselves of it forever.

You can begin to prise the fingers of this delusion from your brain by simply being more specific when you procrastinate.

Instead of “I will do that later”, say “I will do that at this specific time in the future, and I will definitely do it then and not procrastinate again without a medical-level reason. “

Feels totally different that way, doesn’t it? Much scarier and harsher, even though on paper all you are doing is adding details to what you thought you were doing before when you procrastinated.

That’s how you know you have been bullshitting yourself. Being more specific and including an actual statement of commitment wouldn’t change a thing if you actually meant it when you told yourself you would do it later.

On the other hand, if you were lying to yourself each time, adding specifics and a commitment ruins the whole game.

Now you actually have to do it!

And this shit affects all aspects of life. From books you buy knowing you will never get around to reading them and things you PVR knowing your PVR is already packed when other things you will never get around to watching all the way up to people telling themselves they will “get back” to their writing, or drawing, or whatever else they need to do to pursue their actual dreams when deep down, they know they will never do it because it’s always going to be easier to watch stuff they PVR’d, or hang out with friends, or whatever else they do instead of getting on with life.

And the thing about this trap that makes it so insidious is that it is so comfortable. It feeds you just enough of the feeling that you are definitely going to do the thing in order to keep your ambitions and desires for self-actualization placated and makes it ever so easy to let days and years and decades of your life go by without you moving one iota towards that lofty goal you still think you will accomplish some day.

And as long as you always do whatever is easiest, things will never change, and you can rest assured that you can slide all the way to your very comfortable grave believing that you will do that thing one of these days.

Well, I suppose it’s possible that you will one day wake up to the fact that you are middle aged and haven’t done jack shit to pursue your goals for decades and suddenly panic and try to do everything all at once.

But you will soon give up on that and declare it to be “too late” or “too hard” or whatever other bullshit excuse works for you, and go right back to being comfortable.

Heck, you’ll probably even go right back to thinking you will do that thing “eventually”.

After all, it’s not like your standards for believing that could get any lower.

I suppose that if I wanted to turn this into applicable advice, I would say “Do the thing. Whatever it is. The thing that you have been putting off forever. Do it, and then do the next thing, and the thing after that, and so on till you reach your goal. And if you can’t do that, at least be honest enough with yourself to admit that you are never going to do it. ”

This is advice that I need as much as anyone, if not more. I have been maintaining the belief that I will some day “get better” and “catch up” to my peers somehow (in terms of having a job and a life and a mate and so on” without making any appreciable effort to move closer to those goals for way too many years.

I tell myself that I am making progress psychologically, and it certainly feels that way, but maybe I am just bullshitting myself about that.

Maybe all I have been doing is spinning my wheels while I wait to die.

Under what conditions would I actually be willing to leave my comfy comfort zone and start sending my writing to people who might have a use for it?

Maybe if I was diagnosed with a fatal illness. Maybe.

Or maybe I would just use that as an excuse to do even less.

So maybe I should be honest enough with myself to admit that there is no chance of any of that shit coming true unless something changes.

And it’s up to me to change it. I am the only one who can do it.

So the question is : do I want my ambitions to come true bad enough that I am willing to make the sacrifices it will take to achieve them?

Or am I content to wallow in my sty till the day I die?

Either way, this middling bullshit has to end.

And I am the only one who can end it.

I just need to find the courage to endure the pain.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.