That’s how I feel right now. Like I am all alone, sitting on the edge of a steep cliff in some remote and unreachable part of the world, not looking down but looking out towards the horizon, legs dangling idly.

I have no desire to jump or fal. I feel a certain degree of vertigo, but to be quite honest that’s likely a product of sinus fluid messing with my inner ear rather than any desire to dash myself to pieces on the rocks below.

In fact, vertigo aside, I feel quite comfortable here. I suppose that’s quite insane of me, to feel content while sitting o the edge of oblivion like this.

But I’d rather be crazy and happy than miserably sane any day.

As for why this is relaxing to me, I couldn’t tell you precisely. All I can say is that it somehow equalizes some kind of pressure inside my mind in such a way that I can find some peace of mind.

I’m such a weird guy.

While I am up here, I am contemplating the whole “support network” aspect of recovery from depression. It;s a subject I normally find too depressing and upsetting to ponder, for reasons that should become clear, but what the heck.

I am currently uniquely well positioned for a deep dive into any subject.

For those who don’t know, one of the things they say a depressive should have to aid with their recovery is a “support network” of people they can go to for help and/or talk to about their problems or whatever else they need.

My usual bitterly flippant response to this idea is to say, “look, if I had one of those, I probably wouldn’t be depressed in the first place. “

Ha ha ha. But the thing is, I totally do have a support network, actually. I have a lot of people who love me (both VR and RL) , many of whom would probably listen to me if I wanted to vent about my depression to them and be supportive and helpful and all those good things.

And I go to therapy once a week, so I have the more formal part of the network covered.

But none of that means a thing because I am not capable of accessing this network. In a very real sense, it might as well not be there, because there is something wrong with me that makes it nearly impossible for me to truly reach out for help.

I keep most everything to myself, and instead the world sees the bright, funny. sweethearted version I have constructed and like to pretend is the real me.

And it is. It’s just not all of me. It’s the part of the iceberg above the water, and if you didn’t know any better, you would think you are seeing the whole thing.

But you aren’t. For that matter, neither am I.

I can’t be the real me. The real me is unpleasant, negative, and endlessly dark. The real me is a bottomless pit full of shadows, nightmares, and predators who swim the shadows like sharks and can strike all the warmth from your heart with a glance.

Nobody wants to be around someone like that. Even very sweet, sensitive, caring people who really, really want to help me would soon pull back in terror and flee to save what little warmth they have life from the predation of my negation.

It’s just too fucking cold in here. is what I am saying.

And deep in the very heart of my miasma is a massive lump of pure, unfiltered, unfocused, ravenous hate.

Not hate for anything in particular. Hatred for everything. This is crystallized rage raised to the power of insanity, and it hates all of Creation and would destroy all if it could.

That’s the beast I carry with me in my soul. It’s the product of a lot of unprocessed and unexpressed rage turned inward and multiplied by the pain it inflicts on itself.

That’s what happens when, on a very deep level, you take it out on yourself. Pain = rage. Rage = attacking oneself. Attacking oneself = more pain.

Repeat until your fucking head explodes.

I normally avoid thinking about this subject because it brings out such bitterness and contempt in me and yet I have no just object for those feelings.

Because the truth is, if you are too fucked up to ask for help or make use of the help available to you, you are fucked. Period. Nobody can save you because nobody can enter your mind and live your life for you. They can’t make you ask for or accept their help and they can’t help you against your will either.

The problem is in your head, and you’re the only one in there, buddy. So it’s either recover enough to reach out for help or you are totally fucked.

I haven’t recovered enough to reach out. I am just too goddamned scared. That’s why I can only do it in this absurdly indirect form, via writing this blog.

By writing things here. I both keep them in a realm where I feel fairly safe – words – and lets me get things off my chest without having to ask anyone for anything or interrupt what anyone is doing or otherwise remind the universe of my existence.

I can just slip a piece of paper under the door and run like hell.

It’s such a bad problem that I don’t even show the real me to my therapist. He gets a less filtered version of me than others, but I have tested him with relatively small doses of my true darkness and it’s clear he isn’t strong enough to survive it either.

Nobody is. Maybe if someone had got to me when I was a lot younger, there might have been strong enough to face my evil, but it has had a long time to deepen its shadows and sharpen its claws and now it is all consuming.

It is so very, very hungry.

So yeah. Support networks. They are a lovely idea.

But they are not for me.

Guess I’ll just freeze to death in the dark then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been dealing with a great deal of free floating anxiety lately.

Now, partly, that’s because my sleep and waking apnea (they tend to blur together after a while) that I needed to do my breathing exercises – a LOT – in order to get back to something like a normal blood oxygen level.

In fact, I am not even sure I am there now.

This happens sometimes. And it’s relatively easy for me to fix once I become conscious of it. But because I have such a poor connection with my body and because I tend to tune everything out while I am on the computer (and that’s most of the time), it often takes me a while to figure out that is what is going on.

After all, it’s hard to solve a problem you keep shoving to the back of your mind so that you can concentrate.

But slowly smothering wasn’t the whole of this free floating anxiety. The rest, I have concluded, comes from my desires trying desperately to make it through the thick ice-encrusted mass of semi-frozen goop that is my depression.

I came to this conclusion after “catching myself at it” this afternoon. I was pondering what to do and I went through a familiar sequence of thinking about taking a nap, then feeling a stab of anxiety from my video game addiction about all the time that would “waste”, then angrily asking myself what the big deal about that was.

It’s just video games. Time playing them is not exactly precious. I have loads of it. And it’s not like I am on some fucking schedule. I don’t have to get X amount “done” in Y amount of time.

It’s just a god damned hobby. And it will be there waiting for me when I wake up.

This is a well worn path in my mind as of late. An attempt to assert my true will against my video game addiction so that I can regain and retain a sense of autonomy and self-determination instead of always feeling like nothing but a sum of my compulsions.

What was different this time was that I just barely managed to hear a tiny little voice in my head say “But I want to!”.

And there it was, the answer. Well, an answer. The real issue is that part of me wanted to play video games instead of taking a nap. It wasn’t a matter of “wasting” anything at all. That kind of resource-maximizing thinking didn’t even apply here.

It was simply a matter of a conflict of desires.

And that is so much healthier than this compulsive bullshit.

In fact, it now seems bizarre to the point of almost being obscene that I was formulating this all as if it was some kind of resource maximizing thing.

It’s a classic case of “when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail”. My resource maximizing subroutines are robust and efficient and quite powerful in their proper application.

But trying to figure out what to do with my day ain’t it. To continue the hammer/nail metaphor, this is like only having a hammer when what you need is a screwdriver.

So you end up banging the screws in like they were nails. Not good. Especially when it comes time to take them out again.

The sum up : I have been going about this the wrong way. So let’s reframe.

It is not and never has been that I absolutely have to cram as much video game playing into every waking minute as possible. That’s just a silly addiction that I developed when I fell head first into a Skyrim addiction that took two years of my life.

Skyrim was more stimulating and more absorbing than anything I had experienced before and I was not prepared to handle that. And that meant that I developed a hard core craving for it.

And even when I ditched Skyrim, I kept the core addiction because while quitting one’s addiction begins with ridding oneself of the addictive focus (Skyrim), the hardest step after that is developing a new, healthy lifestyle.

Because every addiction has another addiction embedded in it : the allure of a vastly simplified world. One where you know exactly what to do with yourself : service the addiction. It’s like a habit, a religion, and a job all rolled into one.

So on the one hand, I wasn’t playing Skyrim all the time. But I was still playing video games all the time, and playing them compulsively.

Still an improvement, but…. not a cure. My life was, and is, still hollowed out by my video game addiction. I do other things, like hang out with my friends. but I still spend most of my waking hours serving this demon I have summoned.

And it wasn’t always like this. It is vitally important that I remember that because addictions can be so powerful as to blot out all conscious thoughts of anything but themselves. At one point, sure, I played video games a bunch, but I also spent a lot of time hanging with the fuzzies and surfing the web, and that was a lot healthier for me than the solitary and sealed off experience of video games.

I hung out with the fuzzies for two extra potential video game playing hours yesterday afternoon, and it was quite lovely. So much more soul nourishing than video games. I felt the addiction trying to get through but I resisted.

My frustration with this addiction of mine is getting to the point where I am seriously considering going cold turkey. No more video games. I can do whatever else I like on this a-here computer, but not video games.

Dunno if I am strong enough for that yet, but the idea has some appeal.

In the meantime, my short term goal is to simply get back to the state I was in before Skyrim came into my life, where I at least spent time being social and experiencing the wide splendor of the internet some of the time instead of simply plugging my brain into my latest video game and tuning the rest of the world out.

They might keep my mind busy and keep me from having to figure out what to do with myself, but I need more than that.

I need emotional nutrients, god damn it.

And I am going to get me some.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Life’s constant cavalcade of shocks to my system just keep coming.

First, the little : last night at Denny’s I had my order all arranged in my head. Chicken strip dinner, corn, mashed potatoes, extra side : sauteed veggies.

I love me some sauteed veggies.

Then the waiter says they are all out of chicken strips. And I am once more stunned by the unexpected. I am utterly gobsmacked.

I rallied and ordered literally the last thing I remember thinking looked good, which was the Super Bird sandwich.

But it’s crazy how much that threw me off.

It’s also crazy how I keep obsessing over this subject.

So, crazy all around. Enough for everyone. I guess.

Then today, I decided to buy the expansions for Fallout 4. Normally, that would cost a total of $80, but they were on sale for $35, so I figured, WTF.

Then I boot up my newly upgraded Fallout 4, and the graphics are hosed. Big ugly grey lines everywhere. Weird flickery orange patches. Freakiest of all was these heavy, angry-looking purple lines across the night sky.

They looked like a Dragonball Z power attack as drawn by a kid with a lot of issues.

So I run a file verification, figuring one of the files must have gotten corrupted. Nope! Apparently, this is how it is supposed to look now.

Then I escalated (too fast) to uninstalling everything then reinstalling it via Steam. This also did not fix the problem.

And let me tell you, at that point I was quite freaked because for the second time, I had been told the chaos was PERFECTLY NORMAL.

The fuck it is!

So then, once I had calmed down enough to frame a Google search in my head, I Googled the problem.

The only reference to it I could find was this Steam forum thread.

From that, I gleaned that the problem was that I did not have a separate graphics card.

This was a super bummer because that would mean I couldn’t play the damned thing I had just sunk $35 into without spending even more money on a graphics card.

And that would have been TOO FRIGGING MUCH. I was totally going to write a very terse and snippy email to Bethesda, the makers of FO4, thanking them for pushing out an update that broke the frigging game and demanding that they at the very least give me my $35 back, and maybe even what I originally paid for Fallout 4 all those many many years ago as well/

I was very, very angry.

But luckily I did not do that because that was totally not the thing. In a moment of clarity, I ran the problem through the fuzzy friend of mine who designed my computer (Hi Windy!) and she said my computer totally has a separate video card, so chillax.

Before that, I had discovered that I didn’t have the problem if I ran the game “vanilla”, in other words, without mods.

Which made no sense according to the graphic card theory.

Then, while I was talking to Windy about the problem, it occurs to me to check the little nVidia thingy that floats in my system tray and see if there is a driver update or whatnot.

But it ain’t there. Weird.

So I run the program from (gasp!) the Start Menu and it immediately updates my drivers. So I am like, yay.

And that’s where it stands right now. for complicated technical reasons having to do with things I did to try to fix the problem, I can’t just run the game and see if the problem has been solved or not.

But hopefully it has. I wanted to use the nVidia thingy to look for specific “game ready” drivers for Fallout 4, but I don’t recall my password and by then I was too tired and frustrated to put up with any more hassle.

Once I am done blogging, I will tackle it anew.

But at least I know now that all that is truly at stake is my ability to play the game with mods. That’s still a pretty big deal, given how deep I have got into the modding side of things, but at least I have the expansions to play around with.

Besides, I have been seriously contemplating how much time I spend playing games and asking myself what else I could be doing with my time.

I tire of this addiction of mine, and want to expand my horizons to include things which satisfy more of my needs than merely the need to find something to do with myself.

I am a man of enomous talents and gifts. I should be out there in the world making money and doing awesome things.

Lke supporting myself, for one. Actually being able to choose everything in my life – where to live, how to decorate, what furniture to get, where to go on trips, and akll those sorts of things, for another.

Povery circumscribes your options so severely that even the limited amount of autonomy and indulgence afforded by a minimum wage job seems like a life of unimaginable wealth and comfort.

You can decide to go out to a bar for drinks? AFTER dinner out? And you bought a new gaming system with your credit card? Whoa dude!

What’s it like to be one of the one percent?

Anyhow, I suppose my thesis tonight is that life seems determined to just keep throwing me curveballs until I learn to hit them.

Fine by me. I am tired of being a wuss and a coward. I am ready to take my hard knocks and finally grow up and grow a pair.

After all, I have enormous inner strength and integrity. More than enough to handle adversity and rise to challenges, if I only give myself the chance.

If you always run – if your only defense is to melt at the first sign of danger – then you will never know just how strong you really are.

And I am to find out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well it’s been a while, so I suppose I should remind myself of how amazing I am.

I don’t want to. The thought still causes me pain, to be honest. That’s how fucked up my motivational pathways are at this point in my life.

Overmind : Hey you! You’re an amazing person full of warmth and wit, with gifts enough for three people and a unique genius all your own!

Conscious Me : Must you remind me?

It gives me a headache-y feeling, like a bright light or loud noise.

Well, they always said I was bright. Turns out I am so bright I irritate myself.

But why? Why this resistance?

Let’s see…. well, there’s that old standby, responsibility. As a lifelong Spider-Man fan, I know that with great power comes great responsibility, and that scares the webbing out of me, to be honest.

I’m not sure why the idea of taking responsibility for my power is such a terrifying thought to me. Maybe because then I would kind of have to do something with it.

And that would mean figuring out what to do with it, and hello option paralysis.

But no. That smacks of my depression’s bullshit. Another facile dodge. Yet another smokescreen hiding yet another unpleasant truth I don’t want to face.

It takes a lot of work to hide things from a megabeam mind like mine.

I hate my depression, but I have to admit, it does work hard.

I definitely get that feeling like something is trying to pry me out of my safe warm little hell when I think abou tmy own gifts. Like I am a barnacle and some very hungry seagull is trying to pull me from my reef.

In the surrealist cartoon of my mind, this is the part where the prisoner, who has been looking out his window at a beautiful sunny meadow and sighing forlornly while writing in a big book called When I Get Out, sees the door to his cell swing open, gasps, runs over without a moment to lose…. and slams the door shut again.

Then sighs, phews, and goes back to writing and sighing.

Because the truth is, as much as I want to get out into the world, I also don’t. In fact, the whole reason I am stuck in this cage is that the “don’t” force is a lot stronger.

But really, there is no cage. The cage is bullshit too. I have had the key to that door whis whole time. The only reason I “can’t” get out is that I want to keep the world out, not that something is keeping me in.

So fuck that whole metaphor. Kaboom, there go the walls of my prison, and there I am, dazed and covered in soot cartoon style, naked and exposed in that sunny green meadow. the cage blown to bits, gone forever.

Okay, now I am REALLY freaking out.

But oops, too late, the cage is gone and I am just going to have to adapt to life without it from now on.

But it’s okay if I want to lay down and cry for a while. I’m probably overdue.

---

Back to actually talking about the thing I’ve been talking about.

I really am kind of freaking out right now. It’s kind of thrilling. I feel very alive.

Scared, but alive. And that beats “calm but dead inside” any day.

---

I think that, when I have been imagining myself out there in that great big beautiful world , with a job and a hubbie and all, I have been “forgetting” to include the fact that in order to do that, I would have to give up all the comfort and safety I have right now.

As if it was somehow possible for me to leave and stay at the same time.

But no, obviously, logically, I have to choose. I can’t be both out at play and safe at home. If I want that big warm wondrous lustrous world out there, I have to leave.

Well, I blew up my prison cell. That’s a good start. In that sense, I already left.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the waves of panic and terror to subside.

It’s not like I could go back. Not now that I know the whole cage thing was bullshit and I was free to go the whole time. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle. I can’t pretend that I am more trapped than I am any more.

Honestly, I think that at the root of it all. I was just afraid to grow up. Afraid, perhaps, because I don’t feel like I have grown up on the inside at all, and so to me, adulthood means being a child in an adult world.

And I have no faith that I can cope with that like, at all.

And that speaks to a very deep lack of self-confidence. Specifically, a lack of confidence in my ability to adapt and grow stronger when faced with difficult situations.

And that, in turn, is largely a fact that I have not done that much in my life. I fled the difficult situations instead. Retreated into my shell. Hid from my pursuers.

The pursuers were also bullshit. Truth be told.

I find myself wondering how I would have turns out if someone or something had somehow blocked my avenues of escape.

What if something had forced me to stay in the game and play?

Looking back on my life, I find myself thinking about how much life let me get away with. And is still letting me get away with.

I mean, I never even had to learn to study.

And it’s been that way my whole life. It’s all been too easy on one level, and way too hard on, let’s face it, all the others.

I never had to learn to overcome things that seemed scary and impossible at first. Never had to struggle and defeat my fears and toughen up.

I’ve always been far too skilled an escape artist for my own good.

Well fuck that noise. I am going to stay out here in the sun.

It’s not like I have a choice.

After all, I blew up my cage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, the opposite of this :

In my case, those clouds are my depression.

The real question, though, is not what would it take to burn those clouds away or what forceoutside myself is strong enough to rip them off me like a Band-Aid.

The real question is. why do I keep producing the clouds in the first place? What is my depression merely the smokescreen for? I can’t ever burn the clouds away via some kind of mental effort if another, deeper part of my mind desperately needs those clouds there and will do whatever it takes to keep them there.

The quick, simple, and misleading answer would be that it all comes from the primary trauma of being raped when I was four years old. And like all quick, simple, and misleading answers, it’s true….. up to a point.

Yes, that trauma was what caused me to throw up that curtain of smoke in the first place. I took my mind away when I was being raped, and it has never come back all the way. Instead, I became that timid turtle I described before. We will call him Ted.

And like that turtle, I only came out of my shell the bare minimum amount I had to in order to deal with reality. Most of the time, I stayed safely tucked in with all my distractions, with my only window into reality being the screen of my computer or the pages of a book.

You know…. safe places I can control where no matter what happens, it can all disappear with the click of a mouse.

It’s like my distractions play out in an annex of my imagination that I share with reality but which is safely, predictably, and controllably unreal.

So yes, that primary trauma made me retreat into my own mind… but that was 42 years ago, and there has to be a lot more going on outside that veil of smog by now.

Or maybe that is just something I am telling myself to distract myself away from having to face my primary trauma.

It’s hard to tell. Which is the point, I suppose.

Somewhere in my mind is a program which has been running ever since that fateful day when I was raped by a stranger in a public shower stall, and that program’s only mission is to keep my memory of that incident buried as deep as possible in order to protect the rest of my psyche from a potentially fatal level of trauma.

There are people whose responses to such extreme trauma were far less…. functional than mine. People who only wish they had been healthy enough to live on the outside long enough to go to school and go to college and live the life I have led.

It’s good to remind myself of that now and then. Helps me keep perspective.

And perspective is very useful when it comes to not going off the deep end.

Once more I deflected myself. I am way too good at that.

So : this memory-suppressing program has been running for a very long time. And it has unlimited permissions, which means it can do anything it feels necessary to fulfill its ,mission, no matter how bad the consequences for me will be or how feeble and small and weak it makes me feel to have such large portions of my mind walled off.

So this program – let’s call it Program D, for depression – has been running with topmost priority all this time, as if the most important thing in my universe is that I be protected from these highly traumatic memories.

And I am beginning to have my doubts.

After all,. no matter how traumatic those memories are, I will recover. Maybe it was more than I could handle back then, but I am much older now and consequently I have vastly more emotional coping resources at my disposal than I did back then.

Even if consciously experiencing those horrible memories struck me catatonic (one of my worst fears), I would recover, and when I did I would finally be rid of that horrible wound and be able to go on with my life without it.

What a wonderful thought!

And you know what? I don’t have to settle for merely reliving the memory.

I’m a writer. I’m an editor. I can change the ending.

---

(INT., large shower stall. Two shower heads. White tile. A man is slowly approaching a pump redheaded four year old boy, who is smiling goodnaturedly but looks scared and confused by the situation. Both are nude. )

(The stall door is kicked open from the outside, slamming against the white tile, chips of which fall to the floor. In the doorway stands a 6’1″ 300 lb bear of a man, and he is very very very pissed off. )

(He immediately interposes himself between the man and the little redheaded boy, with an expression that promises instant and unspeakable violence if the man should dare to make a move in the boy’s direction. )

Bear : Hey Mike. Do you want to get out of here?

The boy nods.

Boy : Where’s my daddy?

Bear : I don’t know. But you can bet we’re going to find him.

The Bear leads the boy out of the stall, then turns in the doorway to face the man.

Bear : And as for you, I would totally murder the fuck out of you, but you are nowhere near worth the stain on my karma.

(SFX : Distant police siren. )

Bear : I have, however, called the cops. Enjoy life in prison as a short-eyes. Goodbye.

(Bear then exits, leaving the panic-stricken evil man behind. )

(And the audience erupts into thunderous cheering and applause. )

---

There. I did it. I have retconned my own memories. As far as I am concerned, the official record has been amended and the badness no long exists.

What remains of the previous memories has less substance than a bad dream, and is as easily dismissed.

I’m not sure what the heck I just did to myself.

But I am pretty sure it worked.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

They are very shiny.

My Fallout 4 problems have been resolved. So that’s good.

And while they were unresolved, I finally got around to playing Planescape Torment, a super old game I bought a less old time ago.

I had tried it once before but I was super deep into another game I got in the same bundle, Baldur’s Gate II, at the time and that took up all my time.

Trying it again, I can see why it has such a huge fanbase. It is loaded with imagination and fresh ideas and seems determined to be as interesting as possible at all times.

I mean, right from the start, I am a nameless dude with no memories who is covered in scars and who wakes up on a slab in mortuary in a world where, if they have signed up with a certain group, they are re-animated as zombies when they die.

You then meet your new traveling companion, a floating skull who talks like a fast talking character from the 30s. He tells you that you have a note to yoursel carved into your back, and reads it to you.

And that’s just the first few minutes!

So I will likely be alternating between the two for a while. I am usually a one game at a time kind of dude, for better and for worse, but I have been known to alternate now and then rather than have to choose between two good games.

Riveting stuff, I know. Look,m I am barely awake. All you are going to get is whatever happens to be in my brain right now.

---

For example, it is so annoying to look stuff up on the Translink website right now.

All I want is instructions on how to get from my bus stop, Stop #
56479, to the Riverport complex so I can go see Secret Life of Pets 2 with William.

But no matter what I put in, it has me walking to a totally different stop blocks away to catch the freaking bus.

It’s only a few block’s walk, so it’s not THAT huge a difference (except for those of us so fat that walking causes pain), but three buses stop at my stop and I am positive at least one of them goes to Riverport, dammit.

So it’s a matter of principle.

In other words, I am being irrationally stubborn. God damn it all.

At this point, I am half tempted to take a cab. Cabs know where to go. I don’t have to figure it out myself. I just tell the cab “Riverport!” and it takes me there.

Sure, it would cost a lot of money, but at least I wouldn’thave to deal with this bullshit.

I will hold that solution in reserve.

Oh wait, I just got it to spit out routes that start at my stop!

And take two hours to get there, and involve three transfers.

What, the fuck, Translink?

I wonder if they have a number where I can just call someone and ask them.

---

I ended up taking a cab.

So yes, I spent $23 in order to avoid having to walk two blocks. This was neither logical nor sensible nor justifiable in any way, shape, or meaning.

It was an irrational act based entirely on a heady concatenation of stubbornness, laziness, and a sort of kamikaze glee.

And you know what? I am okay with that. I’m crazy and crazy people do crazy things, often for even crazier reasons.

And it’s not even all that crazy. I need to remind myself that there is a vast difference between the irrational and the insane.

In fact, the true insanity is holding myself to an utterly illogical and inhuman standard of rationality and justifiability. Healthy, normal people accept that they do dumb shit sometimes. They accept their own fallibility and frailty.

Thus, they avoid the trap of supposed rationality and the illusion of control it can create. They don’t tear themselves to pieces over logical “errors” (otherwise known as ’emotions’), nor do they fall into the other trap of having to invent elaborate justifications for their purely emotional actions.

Hello, my name is Michael Bertrand, and I am a recovering rationalist. (Hi, Michael!)

I feel in many ways like I am just now being slowly and painfully born. Or rather, that other half of me that died when I was raped is finally pushing its way through the dirt so it can rise, shakily, from its grave.

Growing up is like getting the measles – the older you are when it happens, the worse it is going to be for you. I feel like right now, I am finally getting a true glimpse of what it means to be truly alive and real and present, and not just a pale and shimmering shadow dancing on the edge of nonexistance.

For all those years, I felt like I was less than real. Like I am not really here. Like I am less than nothing. Like I am an obscure scrap of code in a language with no existing compilers stored in a lost file format on an abandoned hard drivein a broken workstation in a forgotten store room of a defunct company.

Like I only minimally existed at all.

And now I know why I was possessed of this strange and irrationational notion : I wasn’t really alive. My cold circuit was supercharged but my hot circuit was down for the count.

And now I am finally waking up. It’s early spring yet, so there is still a lot of ice and snow around and a lot of gross things which have lain dead in the ice for a long time are thawing out and raising a stink.

But I will live again. This I swear. Winter will end and I will be whole and warm and strong and happy and able to embrace life’s fullness with both arms and a song in my big happy heart.

I have seen the echos of my futures self. And he’s one hell of a guy.

I can’t wait to meet him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sometimes that’s all you can do.

The heat has been fucking with my health like it usually does. Can’t believe it took me till today to realize why I was so damned sick. I inherited my father’s tendency towards heat stroke, and so being too hot as about a lot more than just feeling too hot.

There is something wrong with some part of my head ^[1] such that when it is hot out, this part swells up and presses against something important in my brain and the bad things, like nausea and headache and dizziness, start to happen.

This often comes with the very kind of difficulty in thinking that I was talking about in yesterday’s blog entry. Not so bad that I enter total panic mode, but definitely bad enough to impair my judgment and reasoning skills.

Including the ones that would let me both recognize my situation and remember that I actually know what to do to fix it.

Formally, that would be metaconsciousness (hey, I recognize this mental state as a full and intact thing separate from other mental states) and executive function (that mental state is linked to this list of steps and known principles that alleviate it!),.

How did that manage to come across as cute?

It’s probably the exclamation mark.

And this is where actual, genuine grown-up thinking comes in,. because by the time I am in the bad mental state where my judgment is impaired, my judgment is too impaired to be able to do anything about it.

So the best bet is to keep from going there in the first place.

That means good hydration. And that can be a bit of a tricky wicket because it’s about more than just drinking lots of water. You also have to make sure you have the electrolytes to actually retain the water long enough to use it.

Otherwise, it goes right through you, and while that works for some things. hydration ain’t one of them. That water has to hang around long enough to become sweat.

Hmmmm. Come to think of it, my pores are probably clogged right now. Mental note : my next shower should be very, very hot.

Some day I am going to have my own sauna. The “gym” (three shitty exercise bikes) in this building has a “sauna” (a highly claustrophobic box the size of a walk in closet) but I ain’t going near that thing.

Unless there are secret sexual hijinks in there. In which case, I want in.

But until my fabulous wealth finally shows up, the closest I can get to having my own personal sauna is the occasionally steamy shower.

I don’t do them much because they have a tendency to set off my heat sickness, for reasons which should be obvious. That’s why I like saunas because deliberately getting into a hot box is dangerous enough for me without adding humidity.

More on this later.

---

With Both Barrels

The universe appears to have decided to stress test me today.

First, I was about to happily sink into the world of Fallout 4 after adding a few mods when the program I use to manage the mods, Vortex, asked me if I wanted to update and restart the program.

Sure, why not, I thought. FAMOUS LAST WORDS.

Because it only looked like a Vortex update. In reality, it was an update to the executable for Fallout 4 itself.

I found this out the hard way when the game refused to run. See, the program that allows for modding now needs to be updated before I can play with mods again.

So I go to play the game and it goes bleh at me and this is so goddamned unexpected that it totally knocks the wind out of me and I am left dazed for hours.

You read that right. Hours. It’s pathetic, I know, but this blindsided me so badly that I literally did not know what to do with myself for a while.

Obviously, there were millions of things I could do. There are plenty of other games I could play, or gasps, I might even do something productive with my life.

Perish the thought.

But patient readers know that this sort of thing really gets to me on a psychological level. I just don’t take sudden change well. I never have and never will.

This is exactly how people like me become obsessive planners. We try to anticipate every possible outcome precisely so we don’t have to deal with sudden change.

It is a futile endeavour but it keeps us busy.

Anyhow, just as I am getting over that, I find out that tonight’s Paragon meeting is canceled due to Garth’s living room being overrun by pagan NBA worshippers.

Go Raptors, I guess. As a Canadian, it is my automatic and unwavering duty to support my country in any and all battles in which we can beat the Americans.

Trust me on this. That kind of thing is really big for us.

So now I have been disrupted twice, each time leaving me stunned for a period. That’s la mot juste : stunned. As if I was the dazed survivor of a bomb blast.

Metaphoricall speaking, I am.

I know I shouldn’t beat myself up for this difficulty in dealing with the totally unanticipated. Some of us are just like that. I have many mental gifts. Responding well to the unanticipated just isn’t one of them.

I think I obsess over it after because it makes me feel so vulnerable. Like I am some bizarre and delicate species of fish that dies if the water isn’t exactly right.

In other words, it makes me feel like I am not really suited for survival. I am just plain not a robust specimen. The world is hostile to my being alive in it.

Then again,. maybe somewhere out there is an enironment in which I would thrive. There are so many things I could do if I was just in the right place.

But I can’t seem to get there on my own.

I think someone’s going to have to carry me.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

Things ain’t so good in the neighborhood today.

It started yesterday, actually. I ended up not going out to Felicity’s place last night, like Joe and I usually do on Tuesdays, because I had gotten some pretty strong warning signs from deep within the bowels of….. my bowels, and those told me I should stay home and near the bathroom and try to relax.

And things have only gotten worse from there. By the evening I felt cold, and scared, and fragile, and small, and it hasn’t let up since.

Someone pulled the plug and I have been draining away ever since.

Physically, I feel an all too familiar combination of sinus pressure, headaches, nausea, and testicular pain.

One of these things is not like the other.

These factors combine to make one potentially extremely hellish condition, and I have been very carefully managing my condition to make sure I don’t end up that way.

Sooner or later, it’s going to happen, though. It usually does. I will have to spend my twenty minutes in hell eventually. Head throbbing with pain. Skin twitching subtly, sweat pouring out of me so fast it looks like I am under a waterfall, guts twisting like the tear soaked handkerchief of a desperate widow, mind screaming in that special way reserved for those moments when my clarity of mind is so compromised that it’s like suddenly being thrust into total darkness and silence.

Only far, far worse.

Because even sensory deprivation leaves me my faculties to try to cope with the situation and figure out WTF is going on.

But when my mind is compromised. I freak out as hard as it is possible to freak out because now I am in total chaos and nothing makes sense.

It’s bad, is what I am saying.

Luskily, like I said, it usually doesn’t last more than 20 minutes or so – 20 LONG minutes, subjectively speaking, but still a relatively short time.

And it usuallty ends all at once, like a cork was stuck inside me somewhere and the pain gets worse and worse until the cork pops, and then, blessed relief.

In fact, it often leaves me quite giddy for a while. That’s what happens when the pain suddenly vanishes but the endorphins are still there, ready to party.

It’s quite lovely.

But I am also usually glad when it cools down to something a wee bit less psychologically white hot.

I am not built for long trips into transcendental consciousness and the hyper activated mental state that results from it.

I am built for the much more controlled and harnessable version, the creative consciousness. It’s a lot like transcendental consciousness in that it has the same free flowing nature, rich bed of connections, and thoughts springing whole seemingly out of nowhere, but it’s within the safe confines of creative thought.

I feel like kind of a pussy saying that. But there are limits to even my mental explorations, and for reasons I just made clear a few paragraphs ago, anything that goes beyond conscious control is asking far too much of my mistrustful, paranoid, control crazy soul.

I can go damned near anywhere, but only if my conscious mind comes with me.

The idea of being able to go beyond that intrigues me though. I am far from claiming my rational restraints as a sign of superiority or even an undiluted boon. It amazes me to think there are people who can exceed those limits and leave their conscious mind behind and have experiences that are entirely “of the soul”, so to speak, and think nothing of it.

From here within my cage of reason, that seems like pure magic.

And I suppose it is, in a way.

And it’s nice to know that there are places I fear to tread and powers greater than my own, even if only on this extremely abstract level.

It’s a uniquely trying thing to be able to defy the adults in your world at will from an early age. Authority just didn’t take with me. To me, it was hilariously obvious how voluntary authority was, and how easy it was to crush it utterly by simply refusing to cooperate with it.

No wonder I could be such a smartass. I am just glad that it was an occasional thing with me, when I felt rankled or upset by something, and the rest of the time I was a well behaved student who just wanted to do what he was supposed to do.

Otherwise, someone would have throttled me before I left elementary school.

I have been thinking a lot about what I have been thinking of as “the Cheshire Mask” lately. By that, I mean the grinning mocking challenging face of the trickster, the one that has no agenda except stirring the pot for his own amusement and who stings and vanishes, distrupts and disappears, flicks and fades, always just ahead of those who want to kill him by locking him in chains

The asshole, in other words. Not exactly evil because he’s not exactly malicious nor is he seeking to hurt anybody or force anyone to do his bidding.

Instead, he is the purification of the trickster’s role, which is to challenge, disrupt, disturb, and annoy people in order to get them to wake up and think.

Whether or not this is a good or bad thing depends on how you feel about what is being disrupted and who is being irritated.

Robin Hood, after all, is exactly that kind of trickster. He uses cleverness, wit, skill, and sheer audacity to not merely defeat the forces of evil but mock and enrage them, and then he goes off with his merry men.

But so is the Joker. There is far more malice, sadism, and outright cruelty to his “merry japes”, but the role is more ot less the same.

I suppose it all circles back to the one thing I can’t accept about the trickster in any form, including the one in me, and that’s its amorality.

I can’t be the Cheshire Mask, mocking and disrupting without a care for the consequences of his actions as long as he gets to amuse himself at the expense of the serious and the austere.

But he calls to me sometimes. And part of me responds. That part of me wants nothing more than to leave all seriousness behind and turn the world into one big joke.

And so, from time to time, I invite him over for tea.

And oh, what tales he tells!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It was just another lunchtime trip to the bathroom for Vice President of Procuring Ned Anderson until he spotted the sign stuck to the door of one of the stalls.

In marvelously dextrous lettering on crisp white paper were written four words :

FREE BLOWJOBS
INQUIRE WITHIN

Ned stared at the sign for a good ten seconds, unable to believe what he was seeing. He ran through the usual possibilities in his mind.

Was he hallucinating, or dreaming? He pinched himself. Ow. Definitely not. Besides, he had never been able to read in a dream.

Was this a joke? If so, it was rather hard to see the point. Suppose there was some kind of jokester lurking behind the stall door. What would they say when he opened it?

“Ha ha, you like blowjobs!’? Well who didn’t?

No, there was only one solution to this mystery and that was to open the door.

So with the air of a horror movie charachter reaching for the doorknob of the closet where she just heard disturbingly wet sounds, Ned reached for the door, and opened it.

---

Inside sat a cheerful, round faced little man. He looked to Ned like something from box of tea. Or cookies.

Ned’s face fell at the sight.

“Tsk. Oh dear, I have already disappointed you. ‘” said the little man goodnaturedly. “But honestly,. did you really expect to find a leggy blonde with big tits in here? This is the MEN’s room after all. “

Ned frowned. “No…. I guess I didn’t. Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect. “

“And yet you opened the door anyway! How brave!” cooed the man. “But enough chitchat. Let’s get down to business. ”

The little man smiled beamingly at Ned. “Would you like me to suck your dick?”

---

Ned stood frozen in the doorway. A vrery loud voice in his head was demanding that he immediately close the door in the weird little pervert’s face and go immediately to report him to Security, or maybe even the police.

On the other hand, the whole thing was very intriguing to both Ned and his penis, which was already half erect.

The little man smiled again. “I assure you I am very good. Years of practice, you see. ”

Well, Ned said to himself, he had always prided himself on being “straight but not narrow”, and fancied himself to be the sort of person who is not afraid to try new things.

Granted, most of those new things were international cuisines, not an experiment in gay sex, but the principle remained the same.

The little man, sensing weakness, went in for the kill. “It can be our little secret. Nobody need ever know but you and I. ”

That settled it. Ned ducked into the stall and closed the door firmly behind him.

The little man practically crowed with delight. He deftly fished Ned’s cock out of his pants, admired it for a few seconds, gave it a long sniff like it was a fine cigar, then slipped it into his mouth.

Ned’s eyes flew wide, then closed in utter bliss.

---

It was a very different Ned who returned to his office after his longer than average trip to the men’s room.

“Geez, boss, what happened? You look like a bomb went off. ” said the man currently calling himself Rex Clique, Ned’s best friend and executive assistant.

“One kind of did. ” said Ned in a soft, dazed monotone.

“You have GOT to give me more than that. ” demanded Rex prissily.

“I honestly don’t know how to describe it. ” said Ned. He turned to Rex. “Rex…. have you ever had an experience so vast and profound that it boggles your mind?”

“Sure, at Coachella, but I didn’t think you were into those kinds of chemicals. ” said Rex.

“No no no, not drugs! ” Ned insisted. “I’m talking about something…BIGGER. ”

“Now I’m getting scared, Neddy Bear. What on Earth are you talking about?”

Ned turned fully to Rex and looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. He put a brotherly hand on Rex’s shoulder, and looked him in the eyes before saying “There is this guy in the men’s room…”

---

By the time Ned and Rex returned to the men’s room ten minutes later, there was already a line to get in.

They joined it.

Rex said. “so, all you fellows must need to use the bathroom real bad, huh?”

The men in line all nodded solemnly.

“Yup. ” said one man. “I can’t wait to get in there and empty my…. bladder. ”

“Wait, he does that too?” said another, then immediately got elbowed and shushed.

“Uh huh. ” said Rex. “You guys know there aren’t any women in there, right? No women in the MEN’s room?”

Some pretended to be shocked. Others got mad. The angry ones were evenly split between the ones who are angry about what Rex was implying, and the ones who were mad at Rex for thinking they needed to be told.

“Sorry guys. ” said Rex with a winning smile. “Just checking. ”

Rex returned to Ned, a Cheshire grin on his face.

“Neddy my boy. ” said Rex. “Something very interesting is going on here. My feelings are twitching like crazy. ”

“And look at all of the, um…,you know…. ” said Ned as he gestured vaguely in the direction of the lineup’s waistlines. Now that the afterglow had worn off, Ned had regained some of his customary bashfulness.

Rex surveyed the line. “My god, you’re right. I have never seen so many clothed erections in my life. Every man here is hard as a steel spike!”

Rex paused a moment. “Do you suppose they reinforce one another like some kind of erectile standing wave?”

Ned just grinned and blushed the way he always did.

As they moved towards the front of the line, they were able to observe the expressions on the faces of the men coming out.

“This changed everything!” said one before dashing away.

“Oh man, fuck religion. ” said another.

“It was a woman. ” repeated a third to himself, varying to tone and emphasis as if trying to make himself believe it.

Finally, Ned and Rex reached the men’s room. The smell of semen was overwhelming. Mixed in were other male smells, like sweat and muscles and urine.

Finallly it was their turn. Just as Ned was fishing in its pants for his now once more iron rail hard cock, Rex walked up and slapped the little man’s face.

“Jesus, Rexie, what was that for?” said the little man as he rubbed his jaw.

“You know damned well what that was for, WENDELL. ” hissed Rex. “That was for STEALING MY IDEA!”

---

Wow, I finally wrote it.

Sure the song is a little clumsy and obvious, but its heart is in the right place.

I was listening to The Age of Aqaurius\Let The Sunshine In earlier and I was struck by a line that had always just flowed past me before.

It was the line “no more false divisions”. I was like, HELL YEAH.

Amen and pass the bong, Donkey Kong.

Because that is one of the core tenets of my humanism : the belief that there is more that unites us than divides us and that the world is full of false divisions that keep us apart from one another when we should really be together.

Bullshit morally meaningless things like sex, race, religion, and tribe pit us against one another in conflict while what truly matters – the fate of humans – languishes on the sidelines as an afterthought at best.

So I too long for the day when all the false walls come down and we all get together and forget about the superficial nonsense, realize that the most important thing is to love one another, and finally get to be truly human with one another.

I am not, however, expecting it to happen any time soon.

For you see, one of the many levels on which I am the queerest of ducks is that I am both a mystic poet and a hardcore pragmatist. That means I have very high ideals and will accept nothing less than plans that actually work in order to get them.

And you can’t get plans that will actually work unless you are realistic, and that means not falling for the trap of making things easier by creating plans in abstract, or filling yourself with the hot air of unfettered optimism and idealism and leaving reality behind.

Fuck that and fuck you if you are like that. You are worse than useless because you get in the way of those of us determined to actually fix things and draw others like you into intellectual cul-de-sacs to morally masturbate one another while cooing and gooing over what nice people you are while the world literally burns.

The forces of evil could not even concieve of a better ally.

So get the fuck out of the way or I swear to God, I will go right through you.

Because this is grown-up time, kiddies. and we have things to do.

Seems inconsistent with all my peace and harmony talk from earlier, doesn’t it?

It isn’t… I am actually expressing the same thing two different ways. The tone has changed but the message remains the same.

So if you are all butthurt about my angry tone just now, you need to admit to yourself that you don’t want to address the substance of what I am saying, so you attack the tone of it instead.

“How dare he talk to me like that!” you cry, totally not realizing that by including yourself in the group you think I attacked, you are saying that you are a worse than useless person who is an unwitting agent of the forces of evil.

And if you are, indeed, that kind of person, don’t you think maybe you should think about that and decide for yourself what’s more important : my tone, or humanity.

I am sure you will come to the right answer eventually.

Anyhow, where the heck was I…. oh right, no more false division.

Note that it does not rule out genuine division. It just insists that it be based on something real and not something imaginary like race.

People are like dogs – sure, they come in dozens of varieties, but they are all still dogs, no matter how much a chihuahua is unlike a Saint Bernard.

And people are WAY less different than dog breeds.

Genuine division is sometimes necessary. You couldn’t take a “people are just people” approach to stopping Hitler, after all.

So while my goal will always be the unity and harmony of all humanity into one glorious meta-family, I understand that this is not going to happen in my lifetime.

I have heard the siren song of the idea that we are “due for a spiritual evolution” or that we are reaching some mystic date where the illusions will fall and all the world’s people will embrace as one and cotton candy ponies will ejaculate rainbow jizz on schoolboys.

OK, no need to be bitter now, he told himself.

Because the truth is, that idea appeals to me on a very deep level. I would love for there to be that kind of spiritual awakening.

But it’s not going to happen any time soon, and if ever does happen, it will be through the blood, sweat, and patience of hardcore pragmatists willing to get in there and do all the work necessary to bring it about, not a bunch of airy fairy hippies sitting around a circle and feeling very deep and profound.

For me, my ideals demand pragmatism. Anything less would be a self-betrayal. How could I be anything less than a focused pragmatist when there are problems that desperately need solving and only a pragmatic approach will work?

Effectiveness is the only measure that matters. Does it work? Does it work well enough? Could something else work even better?

And that means tackling the quantitative world. If you need to feed a camp full of displaced people in Syria. you don’t need a beautiful theory as to how much food you have or should have, you need a hard goddamned number so you know how much to give to each DP.

That’s why the world “idealism” has been, in many contexts, a dirty word to me. I associate it with people who say they believe as I do, but aren’t willing to sacrifice their own comfort of thought in order to reach concrete solutions.

Fuck those people. Get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand.

But really…. it’s all above the love.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.