No, seriously though. What can I do?

The room I am sitting in right now, my bedroom, is absolutely filthy/ It’s that way because I never, ever clean.

Like ever. Not even in the spring for “spring cleaning”.

The obvious question is, “why?”. Why don’t I ever clean up around here. And it would be easy to be flip and say it’s because I don’t really care about ‘things like that”.

But that would be a big fat facile lie. I do care. I find the current state of my room to be extremely depressing. I would rather live in a room that is much, much cleaner.

And it’s not like I don’t know how to clean up. It’s not that complicated. I have done it before, several meaningless lifetimes ago. I have never been a neat and tidy person but I at least could get it together enough to clean my room once or twice a year.

And I shudder to think of how terrible the air quality in this room must be. That can’t be good for me. It’s possible that one of the reasons I feel so good when I have been out of the apartment for a while is that I have had a break from breathing filth.

Right now, my way of “dealing’ with the mess is to aggressively ignore it. After all, most of the time I am in this room, I am either reading or on this here computer. and thus my attention is absorbed and I am not looking at all the garbage dump of my room.

But on paper at least, I am perfectly capable of fixing the problem and making this room a place that no longer makes me sad if I look at it.

So what is stopping me?

Fear. But that’s a given with me. More specifically, I seem to have developed a fear of spending any more time outside those absorbing activities than absolutely necessary for my survival.

So the answer is fear, but it’s also addiction.

At some point, I sort of abdicated responsibility for my life. The fact that there was nobody to take up the throne I had vacated didn’t matter. I just sort of stopped being an active, engaged person and withdrew into my turtle-shell all the way.

Something something Mitch McConnell.

And now, when I even contemplate actually actively doing things on my own perogative and under my own power, I shrivel up inside from the fear.

Even when it’s something as simple as taking a couple of hours to clean up my room, I quail. The idea of spending that much time away from my compulsive distractions fills me with terror and dread and part of me is sure that if I did that. something really really terrible would happen.

What would this terrible thing be? I’m not sure. But I suspect it is my usual demon – the feeling that something that is IN me would come OUT.

Something terrible and dreadful and disgusting and shameful. So very very shameful.

I have spoken of this Something before in this space. Arguably my entire personality is built around keeping this badness inside me, and having it come out would be the Worst Possible Thing to me.

But whatever the fuck it is, surely I am better off without it. The smart thing to do would be to let myself vomit it all up and accept the consequences. Sure, it would be a gross thing to do, but assuming I did not do it in public. it would be nothing to be ashamed of.

And I bet I would feel so much better afterwards.

So clearly, letting it all out is the smart thing to do. But I have so much fear in me, and it is not interested in logical arguments based on enlightened self-interest.

I’ve never been any good at enlightened self-interest anyhow.

Take that, economists.

Still,. I am contemplating this Great Release now, and that’s progress. I always have to be able to dream of something before I can do it, especially when it’s something potentially quite big like this.

Hopefully I will continue to contemplate it for long enough for my resistance to the idea to melt away. It’s happened with other things before.

I always visualize it as my staring at the thing until it breaks down. Asif I am using the concentrated attention of my conscious mind to conquer all the dark and hidden fears that cannot survive the light of day.

Put that way, it seems almost noble.

Maybe I would be better off seeing my fight against my depression as a titanic struggle between good and evil and therefore every bit of progress is a victory for all that is good and pure and just in the world.

It can be so hard for me to tell where I end and the depression begins, though. We’re like Siamese twins joined at the soul.

And I don’t know who I am without it. That’s always a big hurdle for us humans. Take our deeply equating identity change with death and raise that to the power of our fear of the unknown and you can see why people will fight seemingly minor changes to their sense of identity as if it’s a matter of life and death.

But fuck that noise. I would destroy my entire indentity if that is what it took to get rid of my depression. Start over again from scratch, like V from V For Vendetta did. Figure out who I am from the ground up.

I’m certainly not doing so great as the person I am right now. Maybe a hard reboot is exactly what I need in order to flush all the garbage out of my head and start over with a freshly scrubbed slate.

Of course, there’s the small problem that to do so, I would have to enter a fugue state and completely forget my current identity. And that would be, ya know. insane.

But other than that, I think it’s a really good plan.

Now all I need is a huge amount of psycoactive drugs….

I (or someone a lot like me) will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No topic is currently burning to be talked about in my mind, and so today, I will just catch folks up on this n’ that.

Let’s see…. well, here is Burger King’s Pride ad.

Is that not a sunny patch of magical wonderfulness? Pay close attention, all other corporations, because Burger King just won Pride.

And because of things I have been thinking about lately, the phrase that popped out at me was “people should not be afraid of being who they are. ”

What a marvelous expression of the fundamental principle of individualist cultures : being free to be who you are.

At its core, all individualist cultures are fundamentally hostile to anything which treats any individual as if they are not an individual but merely one interchangable part of an identity-defining of a uniform whole.

That’s why the arc of history in modern society bends towards justice. Individualism is inherently hostile to bigotry. The very definition of bigotry is to treat members of a group – any group – as if merely knowing someone is a member of a group tells you everythign you need to know about said person.

Beware the phrase “I know enough”. It is invariably wrong.

This is also why the social history of every modern civilization cna be viewed as a series of movements to enfrancise and empower with individuality increasingly small groups.

It started with women (half the population), then non-whites (35 percent-ish and rising ), then gays and lesbians(maybe ten percent?), and who know who will be next?

Of course, all these movements are still ongoing, and as they progress through the generations, their area of focus becomes increasingly narrow.

For example, right now women’s rights is in its fourth or fifth wave. So its area of focus is now relatively subtle ways men are still managing to be dicks to them.

Things like not taking them seriously in meetings, denying them the very top positions (glass ceilings), tragically pathetic sexual inappropriateness (how hard is it to NOT whip out your dick at/for women), and that goddamned pay difference I thought we had solved when was still a child.

And I am fucking 46 now.

Now don’t get me wrong – these are all real and serious issues. But from a historical perspective, there is a huge difference between discussing how women are treated at work today and discussing whether women should be allowed to work, like they did when I was a child.

Same with civil rights. I am as furious and sad about unarmed black people being shot by racist cops as everyone else, but there is a huge difference between discussing whether black people are being targeted by racist cops and discussing whether black people are people.

We must focus on the issues of the day, but not to the point where we lose all perspective and start wringing out hands and saying “Have we really made any progress at all?”.

Um, yeah. Loads. We might not be at the mountaintop yet, but we’re a hell of a lot closer than we have ever been before.

Let’s see. What else. Oh right, my new furry smut love afair.

Check this (very very NSFW) bit of gay furry porn :

That’s a goooood kitty.

It’s the eye contact that really does it for me. The way he’s looking at the person attached to that cock for approval and confirmation his ministrations are being enjoyed really does something for me.

It’s just so cute!

And that made me realize that there is a form of submissive male that really appeals to me : the cute kind.

BDSM in general has never done anything for me. To me, pain, dominance, abuse and all that stuff is the exact opposite of sexy.

I need happy warm fuzzy vibes in my sex!

But if you throw away all the whips and chains and intriguing uses of leather and instead imagine a form of submission that actually fits within my warm and fuzzy vibe, suddenly I am SUPER interested.

Bad at innuendo woman : He’s SAYING his DICK GETS HARD!

I could see myself falling big time for a sweetly submissive person who will seek my approval and appreciate my affection and be happy within my sphere of influence.

As long as I am in no way expected to tie, torture, or otherwise torment this person, I might very well enjoy a dom/sub relationship with me as the dom.

Still pretty sure my being a sub is not a possibility. I am too self-contained and stubborn. If it happened, it would have to be one hell of a guy.

Hmmm. Maybe a daddy figure of sufficient male energy.

But even then, I would happily take the secondary position of “son”. I don’t have to be on top all the time. I can be second fiddle when it suits me.

However, I could never accept an inferior position. I am way, way too proud and defiant for that shit. If my hubby even hinted that I was in any way lesser than him, he’d get a piece of my mind big enough to choke a horse.

“Different but equal” is fine.

But inferior? Never.

Oh, and I am nearing the end of my obsession with Fallout 4, I think. I have now played through all the DLC and I am about to beat the game. By that time, I will be Level 50, and that’s honestly enough for me.

Actually, I thought 50 was the level cap for the game, but I just looked it up and it turns out not to have one.

But that makes no difference, really. I have already maxed out every skill that I give a shit about with that character, and so there is not much point in going on anyhow.

When I am done that, I will probably make a new character. A fisticuffs expert. perhaps. Might be fun to go around punching things to death.

But I don’t know if I will play it for long. I am getting burned out on the game, and it’s looking like it’s time to put it back in the vault for another decade or so.

There’s still a whole shitload of mods out there that I haven’t tried, but the only ones I would care about would be the quest mods and all the ones I have tried have eventually crashed and become unplayable because I just plain cannot progress any more.

And even if that wasn’t the case, I would still be pretty sick of the game.

Luckily,. I have already lined up its replacement. Fanatical had a sale on games by Beamdog, who made the two Baldur’s Gate games that I very much enjoyed, so I took advantage of the sale to get the (ick) “spiritual successor” game Neverwinter Nights for only like $6.

Neverwinter Nights has a very impressive score of 91 pecent on Metacritic, and lots of places consider it one of the best games ever.

So I like my odds of enjoying it too.

Well, that’s the news from my neck of the woods for today.

I hope the animation works on that cocksucking tiger pic. It is even hotter when you see him sucking away.

Makes me want to reach down and fuzzle his head.

Good kitty. VERY good kitty.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s an idea I have had for a while. I am presenting it as a thought experiment because if it was a real experiment people would lose their freaking minds.

And it goes like this : what if you set up a group of addicts with an unlimited supply of their drug of choice? What would happen?

From what I understand, most of what addicts do is go after their next fix. This often involves crime of some sort because only crime pays well enough to support their habit.

Cause drugs are expensives. y’all. Thanks, war on drugs! You keep drug dealers rich.

What I want to know is what happens if you take the need to work for your next fix out of the equation. Provide the addicts with all the lab-pure guaranteed uncut drugs they want in a doctor monitored environment. Free them from the need to commit crime.

What would they do with all their time and energy then? It is easy to imagine they would just stay stoned all the time, and maybe they would.

But even people who are wacked out on drugs need something to do. What would they do? Watch TV? Paint? Masturbate?

And think of how much soceity would benefit from keeping these people happy and off the streets. And out of the hospitals, or at least. way less time in them, because they won’t overdose accidentally any more and they won’t get fucked up by whatever the shitbag drug dealers cut their drugs with.

Come to think of it. it would deprive drug dealers of some of their clients too.

But of course, if you tried to make this a reality, people would (like I said) lose their collective shit over it.

Why? Because then we would be “wasting” taxpayer money on a “bunch of dirty drug addicts” and “giving them exactly what they want”.

So what’s so bad about that? If it works? If it benefits society?

See, the “problem” is that society has decided that drug addicts are “bad” people and therefore extremely low status, and people can’t stand the idea of “their” money going to people of far lower status than them.

It doesn’t matter that we long ago determined that addiction is an illness like cancer or the plague and therefore not something for which people are morally culpable.

Even doctors have a hard time remaining true to that knowledge in the face of the massive societal pressure to hate the addict.

We fat people have the same problem. But then again, we’re addicts too.

No, what’s important to the public mind is that drug addicts are “bad” and therefore should be punished for their addiction, not rewarded.

Oh, by the way, why do we have a war on drugs? Because drugs are bad.

Why are they bad? Because they hurt people and ruin their lives.

Which people are those? Um… drug addicts, I guess.

And that’s why we arrest drug addicts and throw them in jail? I suppose.

And does that, in fact, help them? Um…. no.

Doesn’t make a lot of sense then, does it? Unless the real agenda is to give people a group of people who can’t fight back against all of law enforcement and that therefore we can hold down and torture and punish all we want.

Oh, and the best part is they are poor people of color, so we get out racism and classism satisfied without having to own up to it at all!

What can I say…. the system works.

---

I am going through one of my periods where I am hungry all the time.

And god, do I hate it.

The reason why is obvious – I skipped a meal. Something that I should never, ever do, and for reasons that are potential a lot more serious than avoiding tummy grumbles.

And yet, I do it now and then anyhow. Apparently I can’t help myself.

It makes me wonder who is really in charge in my life. Because it is clearly not me. But it’s clearly not anyone else,. either.

Guess the position is and will remain vacant.

This last time, I skipped a meal for reasons that are entirely insane.

See, I ended up being too sick from IBS to go hang with Joe and Felicity at Felicity’s parents’ place last Tuesday. This left me home alone during the time when I would normally have my fourth meal of the day, my midnight snack.

I need to eat every six hours or things go Bad. It should really be every four hours but I have not been able to manage that.

Anyhow. See, normally, when I am home around midnight snack time, that is when I go out to the living room to make my popcorn and hang with Joe and Julian while we watch some Colbert and Daily Show.

But Joe wasn’t there. He was with Felicity.

So you see, I couldn’t do the normal thing, therefore I couldn’t eat at all.

Obviously, that is not literally or logically true. I could eat the same thing I would eat if Joe was home. I could eat something completely different. There are many ways in which I could still have eaten.

But in the world of my compulsions, only doing the usual thing feels possible. To do something different would be weird and hard to do and feel “wrong”.

So obviously, I couldn’t do it, and didn’t have a thing to eat until my next “normal” meal time at 6 am.

And that creates a food deficit that lasts a surprisingly long time. From past experience, I know that the only reliable way to restore the balance is to have an unusually large meal, which I will probably do Saturday night.

It’s almost absurd in its simplicity.

I will try to make my big meal high in protein and other nutrients rather than load up on carbs. Carbs are boring.

I want meat and vegetables, damn it!

Which means I will likely get sushi.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, apparently Morrisey is a hardcore racist right winger now.

As in, he supports a bunch of hateful asshats call the For Britain party, repeats anti-Islam bullshit talking points, and thinks that Nigel Farrage would make a good PM.

To be fair, though, he tried to warn us.

Now I was surprised by this, but not exactly shocked. Sure. Morrisey seemed left-wing for a while. but to me, he always seemed primarily just a selfishly self-regarding and vain and shallow person who learned to hide it by emoting sadness.

MST3K pretty much nailed it.

Holy crap, Mike Nelson is hot in that clip.

Come to think of it, he’s a racist right-winger now too. Life imitates art.

Anyhow, this is a phenomenon with which most people are all too familiar. Certainly all of those on the left know all about it. As people age, their politics shift to the right, and you never know what celebrity you formerly loved and respected will be revealed as having turned to the dark side next.

And it’s not a coincidence that this happens when people’s other mental faculties are declining as well. Conservatism is for stupid people, and it makes no difference whether that person has always been stupid or whether they have gotten that way via senility.

The basic action of conservatism is to substitute strong, primal emotions for thinking. That’s why conservatives’ speech patterns often seem disjointed and unstructured – they are not actually thinking, they are merely stringing together emotionally charged statements in order to create the false and temporary feeling of certainty they crave.

It also, of course, shields them from the true complexity of the world.

This is why they are so dependent on right wing media. Its job is to constantly and soothingly press those emotional buttons in a way that reassures the viewer that the world really is a simple and easy thing to understand and that all the people who say it isn’t are mean and evil and bad for making you feel scared and confused.

This mental decline leads to a moral decline as well. The two are intimately interconnected. As the mental faculties dwindle, the ability to support beliefs based in higher morality, like say humanism, dwindles too.

So the person regresses. Boom goes their adult ethics and what is left, sadly, is the cranky. selfish, cowardly, and cruel morality of a moral toddler.

The only difference is that these toddlers are old, rich, and can vote.

Like toddlers, their emotional response range is limited to either anger or approval. They are either mad about not getting their way or they are wallowing in the fatuous self-satisfaction of an infant who just soiled its diaper.

The one truth that is the most toxic to them is the truth that they are just plain too stupid to understand what is going on any more. All their other anti-reality reactions stem from the need to bury this one harsh truth as deeply as possible.

And while the temptation is strong to shove their stupidity back in their faces via mockery and irony, the truly dedicated and savvy left winger who genuinely wants to save the world from the Donlad Trumps and Doug Fords of the world must learn to exploit their mental weakness instead, and come up with equally emotionally charged and manipulative language of their own.

More on this later.

---

Actually, I’ve lost interest in that topic. Sorry.

So this half of the blog entry will be about….

What normal people get out of being normal

This topic is, amongst liberal intellectuals like myself. just a little bit heretical. It flies in the face of our customary belief that weird is fun and good and normal is boring and bad and therefore there cannot possibly be anything good about being normal.

We have to make a virtue out of our uniqueness, if only to counter all the messages we have gotten about being weird and bad. We are rare and unique, like a pearl, not broken and wrong, like a soup spoon with a hole in the bottom.

It is only natural that by making a virtue of uniqueness, we ununtentionally create the crime of being normal.

But speaking as a heavily isolated weirdo myself, I can definitely see that normal people get a hell of a lot out of their normalcy, and I am honest (or clueless) enough to admit it.

Here’s a few things they get, off the top of my head :

1. Stability. Their world is a lot more stable than mine. By clinging to normalcy they get a surprisingly solid base on which to build their lives. and this gives them a kind of emotional stability I can only dream of.
2. Security. By sticking to the middle of the herd. normal people insure that there are the maximim possible sheep between you and any external threat. Normal, average folk don’t realize they are doing this, of course. It conflicts with our received indivualist values, and to go against those would be just plain weird.
3. Fewer options. This is both a virtue and a curse. But because they do not see the myriad possibilities in every situation that a creative intellectual like myself does, they both make their choices more easily and feel better about them after.

And probably lots more, but I am getting sleepy.

Contrast the life of a normal person with that of a radical genius like myself. Sure, as a mental wizard, I can do many things that would amaze and astound them, and many of them might well wish they could do what I can.

But what they do not see is how unstable. insecure, and indecisive I am. They see me walk through social walls and are astounded, but when the walls are not real to you, there is nothing to protect you from the cold. They see me easily solve problems that vex them mightily, but they don’t see how hard I find some very simple things that they would do just as easily.

Sometimes I wish I could trade places with them for a day, just so they would see what it is like to me and I could get a taste of that other world that shines bright in my mind.

I’d like to come in from the cold now, please.

Can someone show me the door?

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

Something that took me far, far too long to learn :

Give you stomach veto power over what you eat. Assuming you are healthy. you really should listen when your stomach says not to eat something. The taste buds are idiots who have no idea what the consequences of eating something will be. Neither do they care. They just want the flavour NOW.

Listen to your stomach, kids. Sure, it could be wrong. It could be that you can eat that flaming hot tamale and not suffer one bit.

But the consequences of a false positive are way less severe and lasting than that of a false positive, don’t you think?

This goes for our bodies in general. Lately I have been listening to my body^[1] and, in a sense, asking it what it wants.

Turns out that if you ask the body, what it wants are nutrients. Big surprise there. It’s your idiot taste buds that have led people to “crave” unhealthy foods because said foods are supranatural stimuli that produce an unusually (and unhealthily) reward response in out brains, essentially into dopamine addicts. We become dependent on the artificially high dopamine levels we get from junk food, and when those levels drop, it can feel a lot like depression.

Solution? More junk food! And unlike other addictive substances, this one is available literally everywhere you can buy food.

And if you think I am excluding myself from this, well, here’s Larry Groce from all the way back in the 70’s with my rebuttal :

I won’t get into why people are walking around feeling empty inside in the first place. That’s for another day.

Short answer : spiritual starvation.

So junk food makes addicts of us all, with all that implies.

But if we start listening to our bodies and eating what it craves. we can end up eating a perfectly healthy diet without really feeling like we are giving anything up.

That’s because the countintuitivre thing is that if we are paying attention, our bodies will reward us for giving it what it wants. It won’t be the heady rush of junk food, granted. Instead it will the feeling of all the cells in your body shouting “Hooray! Nutrients!”.

And I am not saying give up junk food. That’s a recipe for failure. Deprival doesn’t extinguish desires, and putting people in a position where their junk food addiction leaves them “craving” the unhealthy stuff is insane.

You’re basically saying, “You can be healthy! All you need is infinite willpower forever. ”

Nuh uh. Fuck that noise. If you are craving those M&Ms, go for it.

Just make sure you also eat healthy foods.

Despite what nutritionists and austerity addicts will tell you, eating the bad stuff does not negate having eaten the good stuff. This isn’t a merit system, with merits and demerits. The most important thing is that your body gets everything it needs in order to maintain itself and its health.

Getting more than that of some things (like carbs) is still bad but less bad than it was before because now your body has all the nutrients it needs to handle it.

That big piece of pie is way less likely to go straight to your thighs if it comes after a healthy, delicious balanced meal.

I haven’t come up with a name for this diet philosophy of mine. My first thought was “The Additive Diet”, because it adds foods without subtracting any.

But that name is bad on so many levels, not the least of which is that it sounds like a diet consisting entirely of food additives, like beef tallow or carageenen.

The other name is “the Eat More Weight Less Diet”, which is boffo in terms of sales appeal but sadly has already been done.

Maybe I should call it the “Eat Junk Food And Lose Weight Diet”. or the Junk Food Diet for short. That would grab people’s attention

Or maybe the “Eat What You Want Diet”.

Hmmm. Perhaps it could be structured like Deal-A-Meal or other such plans. You start every day with an empty copy of the food pyramid and a lot of little cards representing the various nutrients you need.

The idea would be to use the enclosed booklet (or the website, or whatevs) to look up how much of what nutrients are in various things and then use the little nutrient cards to fill up your food pyramid.

That would not only teach people what their bodies need. it would also illustrate whatever they are getting too much of without actually saying not to have it.

It’s up to you whether knowing a Cinnabon contains like 14 million times your daily requirement of carbs influences your decision to eat it.

I like this idea of mine. I think it could work. It’s fairly simple and easy to use – you don’t even have to do math if you don’t want to, you can just look at your little pyramid and do what it tells you.

Of course, it’s especially good for us system builder types because it gives us a fun and colorful system to play with and attempt to maximize.

Even if you are not that type of weirdo, the system would still inherently incentivise (sp?) eating highly nutritious food so that you get as many of your nutrients at once as possible, knowing that once that pyramid is covered, you can eat whatever the fuck you want and the system does not care.

And yes, it is entirely possible that if you eat all the healthy stuff, you won’t have any appetite left for the bad stuff.

And that will definitely make the addiction unhappy.

But at least you will be full, and it is way easier to resist those bad impulses when you are full and replete with nutrition.

You know, I might actually be on to something. I should look up some publishers of diet books with my idea.

There’s a lot of money to be made in diet books and I am pretty sure this one could be big. Not exactly the field I was hoping to break into, but money.

I wants it.

I have a lot to think about now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

When the delay was announced, the crowd, never particularly well behaved in the first place, erupted in boos, jeers, and catcalls.

The Ideamaster Surpreme (IM) was used to this kind of thing, however, and remained unphased. “Grumble all you want, it makes no difference to me. I will be back from my break in fifteen minutes. No more, no less. ‘

Exactly fifteen minutes later, the “Ideas to be expressed” window opened again and the IM said “Alright, alright…. settle down, you bunch of hooligans. Now you all know the rules. I am not serving anyone until you form an orderly line and wait your turn. And no skipping ahead either!”.

Grumbling, the unruly crowd formed a ragged line and quieted down.

“All right, ” said the IM, “which one of you is first?”

“I am!” said a smart-faced young man as he stepped forward.

“Now are you really the first idea, or merely the most recent?” asked the IM.

The young man shrugged. ‘Does it matter?”

The IMK sighed wearily. “No, I suppose not. Well, let’s have it then. ”

The young man cleared his throat then mimed holding a microphone. “I think I’ve finally found a way to get more people to care about climate change. Tell them it will make traffic way, way worse. ”

The young man then paused for imaginary laughter.

“No seriously, people. This could work. You’ve seen how pissed off people get when anything interferes with traffic. People who have never had a political opinion in their lives suddenly are very engaged in local politics when traffic is on the line. ”

“So let’s use that rage to save the world. Tell people that climate change will make traffic everywhere far, far worse. Traffic jams that go on for miles. Bike lanes spreading like kudzu. A mass proliferation of idiots who slow down to rubberneck at accidents when people are trying to get to FUCKING WORK. The whole shebang. ”

“Play this right, and you could get a ‘Kill Climate Change Because FUCK TRAFFIC” bill passed within hours. ”

The IM nodded thoughtfully. “Not bad. Needs work, but the premise is solid and the observations are sharp. I will do my best to remember you. No guantees though. ”

The young man sighed, “Like usual, then. ” and left.

Next up was a petite, bespectacled, and immaculately dressed young woman. Prim, proper, and self-possessed, she walked straight up to the counter and looked the IM right in the eye.

The IM smiled at her. “Yes?”

She ahemmed, then in a loud clear voice said “The classic heroic story structure as interpeted in Western civilization can be seen as a battle between the human side of our brain and the far more primitive reptile brain. That’s why the villain is always someone who is superior to the hero on a reptile-brain scale – richer, more powerful, stronger, more dominant, and so on – whereas the hero always has only human virtues – courage, compassion, cleverness, higher morality, and so on – on their side. ”

“Thus, the triumph of good over evil in storytelling can be seen as the triumph of the human in us over the reptile. This interpretation is illustrated perfectly in the case of the mythological figures of the dragon. ”

“Not only is the dragon a literal lizard, but it is always depicted as being strong, powerful, rich, and utterly selfish and ruthless. “

“When St George sets off to slay the dragon, therefore, he is really re-enacting our own evolutionary struggle and triumph. ”

The IM blinked as though awakening. “My word, that’s good. I think you are really on to something there. We must speak more about this later. Next!”

Next up was a tall, fat, bearded man who was as unkempt as the previous client has been tidy. His slovenly appearance, however, was belied by the sharp intelligence in his eyes and the warmth of his smile.

Without preamble, he began. “I have noticed lately that when one of my usual social times with my friends comes to an end, I feel very depressed. “

“And I know why. It’s because I don’t want to return to my dumbassed life. When I am going from being with friends to being alone, I feel like I am a puppet who was lively and entertaining but is now being put back in its box. ”

“And I don’t want to go back in the box. I want to stay out where there are friends and fun and laughter. That’s what makes me feel good. That’s what makes me feel alive. ”

“And that’s a radical thought for someone with my social anxiety. I have spent a long time bowing to the feeling that being with people is danger and the only safety is in being alone, with nobody to judge me. ”

“But now I realize that was the disease talking, not the real me. The real me is far more sociable. And now that I have realized this. I can ask myself the all important question, ‘why can’t my life be more like the times when I am happy? Why do I always have to go back to my video game addicted stupid fucking life where, no matter how much I am enjoying the game I am playing, I am still basically just biding time until the next time when I can come out of my box and truly live. ‘ ”

“This is some serious progress relative to what has been my usual thing, which is that no matter how much I am enjoying my social time, part of me can’t wait for it to be over so I can scurry back into my hidey hole and go back to hiding from reality. “

“I really do, deep down, want to be around people. And I have no reason not to indulge that desire except for a lot of old, outdated fear that is not worth my time any more. ”

The IM smiles. “Good stuff! Consider it locked in. ”

“Great!” said the big man, with a warm smile.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I probably should be telling him this. And I may yet. But I have to get this off my chest and I may or may not have the courage to do it in the real world, so I am going to do it here and that way, it at least gets done once.

t’s hard to pick where to begin when I am so pissed off.

OK, here’s the setup : Joe and I had agreed that when he and Julian got back from Joe’s parent’s place, we would all”watch stuff”, which for us means we would watch one of the episodes of Colbert and The Daily Show we have on PVR.

We have our own cute phrases for things. Aww.

And I was looking forward to this. I was excited for it. And not just because we had gotten pretty far behind on Colbert and on Daily Show. It happened because Joes parents were on vacation so he and Julian were spending most of their time over at Joe’s parent’s place, “house sitting”.

Which is its whole other thing. Apparently they don’t like being here.

Doesn’t that just make me feel fine and dandy all over.

And because they had been away so much, I was missing them, and really looking forward to hanging out with them last night.

So there I was, waiting patiently for them to come home. Usually, they get home at around midnight-ish, and as the minutes and hours ticked by – 1 am, 1:30 am, 2 am – I started to worry that something had happened to them on the drive home.

So imagine my shock when I went to the kitchen to refill my water glass at around 2:15 am and see that the light is on in their bedroom.

I check it out to find he and Julian are undressed and asleep in their bed.

I wake them up and ask what the deal was. Joe says “they fell asleep”.

I ask if they still feel up to watching stuff. Um. nope, too tired.

So I leave it at that and go back to my room. But it’s not long at all before I realize that this shit does not fucking add up.

They didn’t just “fall asleep”. They went to sleep. They intentionally got home, snuck into their bedroom, got undressed, and went to bed without telling me, leaving me entirely in the lurch.

All they had to do was come tell me they were too tired to hang out like we had agreed to do. I would have been a little disappointed but I would have happened. These things happen. Sleep can sneak up on your sometimes.

But no, they went straight to bed instead. And I feel deeply betrayed.

The worst part is that I had the thought that they would do this to me. But I have paranoid thoughts like that all the time and they have always been easily dismissed as the wildly implausible products of my social damage.

And why? Because not only were they absurdly mistrustful and projected ill intent on people I love based on absolutely nothing I knew about them, they never happened.

Ever. No matter what my paranoia cooked up, it always turned out to be not just wrong but comically wrong.

But now one of them has happened and I don’t know how to handle that. Clearly my paranoia is going to be stoked even higher now that it has been confirmed and my already pretty intense trust issues are going to be a million times worse.

How could they do this to me? How DARE they do this to me? How dare they violate my trust like this?

I doubt they know how bad they hurt me with this.

I suppose I will have to tell them.

I am not looking forward to that. I have never enjoyed confrontation. Argument, sure. I love to argue. To a fault.

But real confrontations have real emotional stakes and involve a lot of very ugly emotions that I would just as soon avoid.

Sadly, that does not mean that they can be avoided entirely. Sometimes they are vitally necessary in order to work out conflicts between people, whether it’s merely by getting things out in the open or via the exact sort of big drag out argument that is very hard on people’s nerves but ultimately serves to clear the air and help everyone calm down.

It’s kind of like a thunderstorm. They too clear the air in a loud and violent manner.

Myself, I am very much a peace, love, and harmony kind of guy. I want the good vibes that come when people are getting long and enjoying one another’s company in a free and relaxed atmosphere where everyone can be who they really are.

That’s why I am so nostalgic for the days when I ran the local furry community. I created that kind of environment for people with the monthly furmeets I organized.

In fact, I did such a good job of it that it barely seemed like I did anything at all. To the casual attendee, it seemed like these things just came together and that good, warm, accepting vibe we had going was the natural result.

And that’s exactly how I wanted it. When I lead, I am not looking to be the center of attention and I do not make it all about myself.

What matters to me is results, and I am quite proud of the results I got. People had a happy little haven once a month where they could let their fur down and hang around and enjoy that most precious thing of all – the company of like-minded individuals.

I miss that. I sort of have that with the FRED I have organized, but we’re all so damned old and tired that it just doesn’t have the same vibe.

I wonder if Vancouver still has an organized furry scene? I wouldn’t mind getting in touch with it. I might even attend events if they are not too crowded.

And if it turns out there isn’t one, well…. I would just have to found one again.

Sometimes the only way to get what you want is to create.

And that’s when I really shine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Damn I love that song. So sweet, raw, and tender.

That’s my jam. dog.

Actually, it’s marmalade, but I’m not going to tell HIM that.

Don’t get the wrong idea from how sad that song is, though. I am not uber depressed or in danger or anything. Relax.

I am, however,. in a somewhat melancholy mood. And that’s cool. I like melancholy. I can do melancholy. I get along well with melancholy.

By the way. did you hear about the scientists who spliced watermelon DBA into a collie bitch so she could have some melon-collie babies?

See. I’m good/.

From what I can tell, my melancholy moods are part of my patent pending emotional processing system. Sometimes the slow digestion of all that frozen emotion needs a lot of my mental resources and that shift in energetic priorities puts me in a thoughtful and introspective mood as my inner world asserts priority.

It can do that whenever it wants, and the conscious me has no choice but to scramble to cope however it can.

Such is the cost of genius. All that deep, heavy processing might be tiring and sometimes very confusing to the conscious me,. but it’s also where all those ideas and insights and other processing heavy products come from.

It’s like when you are playing a game on your PC when suddenly the performance takes a nosedive because the operating system has chosen this moment to start defragging the hard drive or something, and all you can do is wait for it to finish.

I’m not the only one that happens to…. right?

I mean, no wonder so many of us genii go nuts. Society is, naturally. built for the center of the bell curve and not us extreme outliers. Therefore, the public education, both formal and informal, that we receive contains no information about how to cope with having the sort of mind I have.

And people being how they are, the question, “How do I cope with being incredibly intelligent?” is unlikely to provoke a sympathetic response from most people/

Even though it’s a real problem for those such as me and I, your fellow human being, am in genuine need of guidance on how to deal with very real pain, people won’t hear that. They will just hear. “I’m smarter than you!” and stop listening.

The only people who won’t react that way are people as smart as I am, I guess.

I am sure they are out there somewhere.

And the only word for this phenomenon is jealousy. I feel like an asshole for saying so, but it’s true. If people are jealous of you, they have no compassion for you, even though you did absolutely nothing wrong.

And I know this from personal experience. I was the target and victim of the jealousy of others all throughout my childhood. Those bullies that tormented me weren’t merely opportunistic sadists. They were getting back at me for making them feel stupid in class. even though I never meant to do so and did absolutely nothing but be myself.

I have never lorded my intelligence over anyone ever. It’s not in my nature. The idea of it nauseates me. I want people to be happy and harmonious and deliberately hurting anyone in anything but self-defense or the defense of others is the opposite of that.

It might be said that I had a smug and arrogant attitude about my schoolwork, but in my defense. I was too socially clueless to understand that this hurts others.

I certainly never meant to hurt anyone. If I had known I was hurting people, I would have learned to tone it down a little.

I will always be proud of my smarts, but I don’t have to be a dick about it, even passively and in total innocence.

That doesn’t change the fundamental unfairness of being hated and discriminated against because of the jealousy of others – especially from my teachers.

I have talked before about how teachers did absolutely nothing in the face of all the bullying I got because they didn’t like me either.

Well, jealous and resentment was a big part of that.

This has made me realize that disgust is not the only negater of compassion. Jealousy subtracts from it too.

Imagine this scenario : a small boy has just received a savage beating from his drunk and drooling father while his mother cried in the corner and did nothing to help him because she didn’t want to get beaten herself.

Do you feel feel compassion for this bruised and battered boy, blood dripping down his face, crying his eyes out in utter despair as he hides from his own father?

Of course you do.

But what if you knew that this child was the son of a billionaire, and had grown up living a life of luxury and privilege you couldn’t even dream of? What if you knew he had a bedroom bigger than your entire apartment, every toy he ever wanted, a team of personal servants devoted to his every need, and ate and dressed better than you ever will no matter how long you live?

It shouldn’t matter, should it? But it does.

And you might well say, “Hey, at least he’s still rich!”.

And that’s true.

He’s also still crying.

And he’s still bleeding.

And he’s still scared out of his mind.

And this event is still going to scar him for life both physically and mentally.

So why should his socioeconomic status make the slightest difference in how much you care about his plight?

Do you really think that there are toys so fun or food so good or bedsheets so soft that they make what happened any better?

Do you really think that he is better off than a kid growing up in a trailer park to whom the exact same thing happened?

Is your jealousy really more important than the suffering of a child?

See, this is why rich people think everyone hates them. Imagine if you knew, deep down, that you could get crushed by a meteor tomorrow and nobody would care?

Well that’s the kind of thing that happened to me over and over ibn my childhood. You just have to replace wealth with IQ.

I did nothing wrong. And yet, jealous made people hate me, including my teachers. Because they hated me, I was severly bullied and nobody gave a shit.

In fact, they approved. They wanted me to suffer for making them feel dumb too.

How could that possibly be fair?

How can that possibly be right?

Answer : it can’t be.

And I think we need to figure out what to do about this.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Therapy today. Poured out my recent thoughts about not being able to access the support network I had. Talked about being afraid to really talk about what I feel inside because I am convinced that my darkness will devour people and that there is nobody who could survive it.

But that got me thinking about how true that really is. It certainly feels true, and that’s valid and significant. And it’s certainly healthy for me to express such emotional truths.

And it’s not entirely based on my own emotion. I have seen people’s look of animal panic and dismay, as if the ground below them had turned to quicksand, when I crack open my cabinet of shadows and let one out to play

Unsurprisingly. they then want to get the fuck away from this sweet guy who suddenly turned into an evil wizard. And even those that don’t flee, like my therapist, get that hunted look in their eyes.

He rallied after that and has now told me over and over again that I can share whatever I need to share and that he can handle it.

But I know what I saw.

So this feeling that noboby can withstand exposure to my actual darkness is not entirely delusional. I have seen the effect I can have on people.

Why is this? It probably has a lot to do with having a very intense personality that can project emotion very strongly while also using my verbal skills to mold and shape those emotions into words that evoke emotion all the harder and make that emotion penetrate deeply into people’s minds.

That’s delightful when I am being funny and charming but when I am expressing my depressing negative thoughts, it can be downright toxic.

Hey, I never promised every trip would be a good one.

But given how very limiting this fear of hurting others with my real emotions can be, it’s worth examining it in detail to see if it’s really as bad as I think.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. If it isn’t, then great, I am then cleared to let loose in some appropriate forum without worrying about destroying someone’s soul.

And if it really is as bad as I think, maybe there is some way I can express all this dark crap in a way that makes it someone’s choice whether or not to risk annihilation.

Poetry comes to mind. Or horror stories.

To start with, I have never seen, read, heard, or otherwise experienced any media that has come even close to expressing my level of darkness. As far as I know. anything I make from these sticky shadows of mine will be uniquely potent.

So the question is, can I live with myself if I unleash something like that on the world?

I could be glib and say “Hey, it’s just words!’, but that would be disgustingly disengenuous. As a writer, I am all too aware of how much words can hurt, so I can’t very well pretend that I had no idea mine could do such damage.

More on this later.

---

And I return. With aching joints. Feels like I am having some kind of full body inflammatory response to something or other – who knows what.

I will take my second Aleve of the day, and soldier on for you good people who show me the ultimate kindness by actually reading the silly words that I write.

Now where was I. Oh right, the moral implications of putting the full force of my dank and desperate darkness into my writing and thus unleashing fresh havoc on an unsuspecting and largely undeserving public.

As long as it’s in a written form and in a place where one might expect to encounter such materials, I don’t see a moral problem with it. Not a real one anyhow.

I mean, part of me insists that my words are especially deadly and destructive and therefore I bear a special moral burden to do no harm with them, but that is probably just the depression talking.

It wears a lot of different masks,. but in the end, it’s always the same old game.

It does make me wonder, however, if the likes of Clive Barker or Stephen King ever wondered about what responsibility they bore for the effecrt their words had on people.

Probably not. They probably do not have my overdeveloped sense of responsibility and figured that people can look after their own sanity and that nothing they could write could do lasting harm to the average sane adult human.

Plus, I think at this point I need to remind myself that there’s a big difference between the damage my darkness wants to do and the damage it can do.

Sure, there is a raving beast-man inside me that wants to scream KKND{{1]} and tear into all human targets in order to externalize its howling pain.

But for all I know, when it actually gets out into the world, it will be brushed aside like a rambunctious kitten and all my sound and fury will signify nothing.

What if it’s the worse case scenario, though : that unleashing my demons really will hurt the fuck out of a lot of people.

Would I still do it?

The sad truth is : yes. Yes I would. My only worry would be getting away with it. If I could transfer my demons to someone else against their will, I think I would.

I am tired of being the cage for these demons. I am sick of putting the safety of others ahead of my own well being. I no longer wish to babysit monsters and play nursemaid to horror beyond understanding.

I want to be clean, damn it, and if that means dumping my toxins into someone else’s back yard under the cover of night, so be it.

One way or another, I am going to be healthy.

If if I have a make other sick to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] Kill Krush And Destroy [[1]]