Good god, am I sleepy.

And that’s after six hours of sleep.

This is the sort of thing that makes me reluctant to take my sleeping pill. I was about to go to bed and was not feeling super sleepy so I thought I had better take a trusty ol Trazadone before I got my forty winks.

And don’t get me wrong : getting that much sleep is great in the long run. I am sure I needed it. I am sure I got lots of that wonderful REM sleep.

But right now, it’s super annoying, because I am still really sleepy. It’s a struggle just to stay awake, let alone eat my lunch and make with the words.

Oh well, hopefully the Diet Coke I am drinking will work its caffienated magic and perk me up enough to make this easier.

Why does sleep have to be so god damned complicated?

---

Why is making decisions for myself so painful and scary?

Why is it so hard for me to face my problems and solve then? Why do I turn away and block them out of my mind instead?

I suppose it stated with being raped at the age of 4 and dealing with it the way many other victims of child rape do : by taking my mind away.

By telling myself that this isn’t happening, this isn’t real, and de-focusing my mind to turn everything into a vague blur in order to mentally distance myself from the sitation as much as I possibly could.

That set the pattern of withdrawal that has plagued me for my entire life. I don’t face all the things I don’t like and in theory could easily fix just like I haven’t faced what really happened to me on that day my life was ruined by a stranger’s cock.

All my life since then I have spent throwing myself into some form of media consumption (reading, TV, video games) in order to withdraw my mind from reality as much as I possibly could in order to escape my terrible reality.

And I am still doing it. I spend most of my time escaping by playing video games. Meanwhile, my many health problems go largely untreated, my room is a horror show due to total lack of cleaning, and I remain scared of reality.

So much for being a rugged truth warrior.

And I try to escape this frostbitten life of mine sometimes. I know there is a great heat and light within me that is struggling to make it to the surface of my mind so it can give me the emotional warmth and healing I so desperately need.

And yet, on another level, I cling to my icy cold cage.

Why? Because it’s familiar, I suppose.

And because I still use it to hide behind. For all I rail against the deadly hypothermia of the soul that cuts me off from the world and leaves me starving and miserable, I also enjoy the fact that it keeps me numb from my pain – a lot of which it also causes.

It’s really frigging complicated.

From that point of view, I won’t have my emotional spring until I stop using my numbness to shield myself from both reality and my inner pain.

From another point of view, it’s all about that deep freeze in which I keep all those frozen emotions that I have never dealt with.

With all that ice around, it’s no wonder I feel cold. And if I want to get better, I have to melt that shit down and thus reduce the burden of ice in my soul.

Luckily, that’s happening. Between the blogging and therapy, I am (very slowly) calving icebergs from the glacier that sits on my heart and letting them melt as they flow south.

And it’s not easy. I get a deep and terrible cold feeling in my heart as they ice leaves me. It honestly feels like I am regurgitating ice cubes sometimes.

But I keep it up because, over time, I can feel how with every ice cube I disgorge, ,my inner chill reduces and I get some of my mind back and can think – and cope – better.

It’s so fucking slow though.

---

Still really sleepy. Damn you caffeine. Work, dammit!

And damn you Trazadone. Why can’t sleeping pills let go once I am sound asleep?

But no, they never help me get to sleep. They just makes it harder to wake up.

I am having a hard time focusing, I will finish this later.

---

Got some more sleep. Feeling somewhat more awake now. Still wish I could sleep for another, oh, year, but I think I can at least finish my words now.

Been poindering self-control. I place an enormous burden of self-control on myself. And yet, my life is nothing like how I want it to be and I don’t do the things I should or, more importantly, the things I want to do, so how much control do I really have?

Clearly, something has gone drastically wrong.

I want to stop treating myself with such brutality. In fact, I want to get to a point where I am not constantly trying to force myself to do the things I want to do (and failing) and instead lead a more natural life, where my actions spring from my desires and not from some regime my stupefying superego is trying to impose on me to force me to be what it thinks I should be.

Because that shit does not work. In fact, it wrecks everything and gets the opposite result of the one intended.

Maybe that’s the idea. I don’t know.

As corny it is, the secret is self-forgiveness, and learning to love myself. Give up on trying to force a result and worry instead on healing and love and treating myself with the gentle love and warm compassion.

The problem is that forcing myself to do things is the only way I know to get things done. I fear that if I let go like that, I will just end up falling apart like I did with Skyrim and end up far worse off than under my current unfreinedly regime.

But that’s probably the depression talking. Maybe I would fall apart for a while buit maybe I woukld then pull myself together not via sheer force of will but based on my true desires and who I really am.

Maybe I should do things because I really want to do them.

It sounds so simple, but…..

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.,

I was originally going to say ‘A cranky fox’ but thought “grumpy” was cuter.

And therein lies my dilemma.

As patient readers know, grumpiness is a strong issue in this lopsided labyrinth of a brain that I call home.

From birth, I was around when my father took his bad moods out on us, the family he supposedly loved, and I vowed at an early age that I would never, ever do that.

But the thing about that is that when you make such vows as a child, you tend to go a wee bit overboard.

After all, you’re too young for nuance.

In my case, I left no room for really any way to express anger. That was only reinforced when my circumstances and my natural abilities and temperament combined to make me the kid that is always cheerful and funny and pleasant and trying his darnedest to earn your love by entertaining you.

Around adults, anyhow. My fellow kids were not amused.

Part of the deal I did not know I was making with the world was that I had to be as pleasing as possible to everyone at all times and that meant not only never expressing anger at all, but not expressing any negative emotions whatsoever.

After all, I was doing my damnedest to make people happy so they would want to stay around me and not flee like everyone else did.

And nobody wants to be around a grumpy fox!

Or so I used to think.

I get now that things are not quite so simple, nor are they really that severe. People express negative things to one another all the time. It’s called ‘venting’ and it’s one of those things that people who are at least somewhat fond of each other do for one another on a generalized quid pro quo  basis.

A ‘you listen to me rant and I will listen to you rant’, sort of thing.

The important difference between that and my father’s short temper is that venting is not directed at the listener,. It’s directed at some third party who is not present.

And that’s what makes it something people can do for one another, within reasonable limits. The venter gets emotional release and the listener gets a little vacarious experience and possibly a little catharsis of their own.

So my childhood setup of “be as pleasant as possible at all times or people will realize how horrible you are and flee screaming’ is, to put it mildly, out of date.

I have also made it past the point of fearing my massive inner rage reserve so much that I am afraid to so much as touch it for fear it will explode and take my sanity and quite possibly my freedom with it.

After all, if I go crazy, I would probably hurt people.

And they lock you up for that sort of thing.

But I see that whole line of thinking as bullshit now. I might not have the majority of my marbles but my sanity is not so fragile that it could be blown to pieces by an act of mind.

You can’t think yourself crazy, is what I am saying. That’s just another of depression’s lies. Even an unbalanced mind like my own has mechanisms to rebalance itself in case of extreme mental events.

The worst that can happen is that you will have a bad period where life is not very fun because now you have to process all that emotion you unleashed.

But to leap from that to “definite murder spree” is laughably absurd.

I might feel like it for a few moments. But that doesn’t mean I would do it.

So I guess you could say anger and I are becoming better acquainted. We’re still not best buds by any means, but we’re at least in the same room and can exchange cordial yet strained pleasantries with one another.

We will get there.

I am also more open to the idea of venting on a stranger than before. Not to the point of becoming a horrid troll (although, if the Internet has been around when I was a teenager….) but just to the point where I am willing to add my voice to public debate in a very strong and aggressive way.

And fuck’em if they can’t take it. Suck it up, buttercup. I know you’re not used to liberals who can match or exceed you in volume, rage, persistance, and impact, but I’m on the scene and you are just going to have to take the pacifier out of your mouth and grow the fuck up already.

I could have such fun with that kind of thing.

The best part for me, being the infinitely pervse critter that I am, would be that I would be forcing people who are used to just following whoever is the most “alpha’ to actually think about who they are following because now, there is a liberal pushing that button.

Thus I remove their ability to just “go with their gut” and force them to actually think about what they believe and why.

And that is, ultimately, the tricker’s true mission : to make people think. To wake them from their slumber so they can see things as they really are and make better choices that get them better lives.

I am not so crazed an old coyote that I think there is any value in just standing atop a hill screaming ‘Think, dammit!’ at passersby.

But there is worth in being the loud annoying beeping that warns you that you are about to drive off a cliff so WAKE UP AND STEER ALREADY.

And I know that if I adopt a full on aggressive political persona, it will piss off a lot of people, a lot of them my fellow liberals.

And I am one hundred percent fine with that. They need to wake up too, and stop being such pussies about everything.

These are dark and dangeous times and that calls for people who are willing to fight tooth and claw for what their believe and not give up until they win.

It’s time to stop being “nice” and start KICKING ASS.

And if that idea gives some liberals a quiver in the liver, they can stay at home and wring their hands at such unspeakable violence.

The real liberals and I will be too busy to care because we will be at war.

And that’s the bottom line, motherfuckers.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, so I didn’t have a red hot idea of what I wanted to write tonight. So sue me.

I wonder when people started saying that?

Been feeling anxiety and depression lurking just over the horizon of my massive reality denial field today. Even as I entertained myself with Fallout 4 (current hobby : murdering things with a tire iron) I could feel this shadow lurking out there, waiting impatiently for the moment it could pounce.

Joke’s on it. The way I live my life is expressly designed to keep my mind so busy with this n’ that n’ the other that it never, ever, ever, gets a chance to GET me.

I wonder if there is a limit to that, though. By default, I have assumed that I could (sadly) keep doing it till the day I die. just stay huddled in my tiny cave, determinedly and stubbornly ignoring everything going on outside by using my entertainments to keep the space where reality would go filled with something else.

Anything else, really.

And like with my adorable turtle metaphor from yesterday^[1], staying withdrawn only makes things worse.

But what if that ability just…. runs out some day? What if my shadows get strong enough (or my resistance becomes weak enough, or whatever) and all that bad shit I keep marginalized in my mind breaks through?

I am ashamed of how much that idea appeals to me.

Because then I wouldn’t have to decide to do it. I would be spared all the need for a painful self-sacrifice by forcing myself to choose because – miracle of wonders – the choice would be taken away from me and I would have no choice but to deal with my bullshit and finally get my shit together.

What a wonderful idea! I feel warm and flushes just thinking about it.

But why? And what does that say about the nature of my issues? Most people would think that having all their demons come for them at once would be their worst possible nightmare and the sort of thing they would sell their soul to avoid.

But I’m Not Most People (INMP). To me it sounds lovely. So what’s my deal?

Clearly, the sticking point is decision. So let’s look at that. There is something about having to decide when to face my problems that is so bad to me that it makes a psychological apocalypse seem love a warm summer daydream to me.

I know that I have serious issues around decisions when they are personal ones. In other situations, I can be swiftly decisive like a top notch executive, but one of the unholy rules of depression is that everything is different when it applies to YOU.

Even when that makes no fucking sense at all.

Anyhow, patient readers know I have issues with option paralysis. And I used to wonder why that was. What kept my normally brilliantly analytical mind from being able to evaluate the available options and choose an optimal route?

The easy and misleading answer would be that there are just too many options. My creative mind comes up with far more options than I am capable of evaluating, so the whole process breaks down at that point.

But I no longer think that is the real answer. I think it’s one of those bullshit tricks my depression pulls to protect itself.

It’s a dodge,. basically. And I won’t fall for it any more.

In fact, I bet if I tried to actually articulate all those options, I wouldn’t be able to because they are not real. All that is really there is the feeling that there are too many options and I can’t possibly choose.

Either that, or my mind subliminally phrases the questions so broadly that I would basically have to process the entire universe to answer it, and gets the depression’s desired result that way.

And I know that I am cognitively capable of overcoming that problem. I am totally capable of breaking down a big decision into smaller, solvable units and then intergrating the individual results into an overall solution.

I mean, that’s synthesis, and I totally rock at that.

So clearly the problem is emotional. My depression throws up this bullshit roadblock to give me the “escape” from the situation it has made artificially stressful by giving me the “excuse” (may lightning strike them all) that, well, I just CAN’T possibly do this clearly totally imPOSSIBLE thing!

What a load of crap.

Well that shit ends now. I am onto you and your dirty little tricks, Depression, and I am going to dismantle and destroy every single one of them until there is nothing left for you to hide behind and you and I can finally have it out once and for all.

A battle you know you will lose. Hence the hiding.

You know that I am unstoppable once my willpower is fully engaged and I have a clear target to focus on. I am the motherfucking DEATH STAR when I get going, and nothing and nobody can stop me then.

And I have a simple solution to option paralysis : cheerful fatalism. It’s the perfect antidote for taking things way too seriously and thereby turning even the most trivial of decisions into some kind of life and death struggle.

Let’s spell it out here : I hereby declare that I don’t give a fuck what happens to me. Positive or negative, all outcomes are welcome as long as I am getting somewhere.

Even tragic failures with lasting negative effects are better than this icy paralysis based on nothing but bullshit and lies.

Whatever happens, it will be because I was living life instead of hiding from it, and that means it was totally worth it.

So what if I am in the infinite hall of infinite doors? That doesn’t mean I have to be Burridan’s Ass, starving to death from its inability to choose one pile of hay when they are both indentically close and appealing.

I can just start opening doors and dealing with whatever the fuck is on the other side. Good or bad, it’s still better than starving in the hallway.

And despite what my depression tells me, I can cope with negative outcomes.

Because I am not a trembling mimosa, shrinking away from the slightest touch.

I’m the Juggernaut, bitch.

And I am going go get what I want out of life.

Even if that means destroying everything that gets in my way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Which is not nearly as fun as getting beach head.

I have a few minutes, so I figured I would get a few words of blogging in. I was waaaay too sleepy earlier and so I have not blogged at all, and I am about to head out to do that crazy ol Paragon thang, so anything I can do to reduce the wordcount facing me when I get home is a Good Thing.

74 words already! Yay me.

See, I usually don’t get back from Paragon until around 10:30 pm to 11 pm, and if I have not yet blogged, that gives me 60 to 90 minutes to blog 1000 words.

And I can do it. That’s not an issue. I have done the whole thing in 45 minutes. It was a little more stream of consciousness than usual,. but that’s no biggie.

In fact, some of my best writing comes when I write so fast that there is no time for me to think about what I am going to say next and so everything just flows.

Maybe I should do that on purposes in the future. Give myself little time trials…. 500 words in 30 minutes, or such. Lower the amount of time till I hit the optimum “in the zone” speed where I am writing at the same speed at which I think.

If that is even possible.

I mean, I think pretty fast. And deep. So I doubt I could ever translate the full depth and volume of all my thoughts into words at the speed at which they occur.

But if I could just get the words out at the same rate at which they accrue, I could at least break even and get some fucking peace in the chaotic newsroom from Hell that is my conscious mind.

Which remind me, I meant to get this written down : All my life, or at least ever since I first went to school, I have had these moments where my mind revs up too fast and my thoughts start to scatter and disintegrate as the anxiety starts to kick in.

And for almost that long, I have been able to handle this simply by grabbing hold of myself and telling myself to stop, slow down, and do the next thing slowly and carefully and step by step.

And, you know…. doing that.

And it works. I detach from the moment and slow myself down and slowly and deliberately do the next whatever, often saying each step to myself in my head

Like “OK…. now click refresh…. right… now check for new messages… ” or somesuch.

And I suppose this does not happen to most people. I consider it to be a danger of my high revving high perforance brain. Sometimes parts of it go out of sync.

But recently, it occrred to me to A) document this phenonmenon as a way of expressing who I am, but more importantly. B) wonder what would happen if I could not do it.

Something pretty bad, I assume. Something crazy. Something…. neurological.

Because the small amount of it I experience before I cut it off is pretty scary, actually. It’s a hard thing to put into words. It’s like suddenly there’s no road under my wheels.

Hmmm. It’s a lot like those moments when my mind spontaneously dumps its short term memory and I have to reconstruct everything.

I get the feeling that those two phenomena are two of a kind.

Well you have to expect that a brain like mine is going to have some peculiarities. Even some issues unique to high powered mentation. The cognitive structures we culturally inherit work great for most people.

But like it says on the T-shirt I swear I will one day design, I ain’t most people.

Welp,. time to go.

Oh…. and I just wrote 640 words in 20 mins.

Because I am AWESOME.

---

Back again for the other 360.

Been pondering what I will call the Turtle’s Dilemma.

See, the turtle can always escape. If things get too stressful orscary or just plain too damned complicated for it, it can literally withdraw into itself and hide in its shell.

And that’s fine…. if it’s the sort of problem that goes away by itself, like a predator who gets bored and goes in pusuit of less reclusive prey.

But this is a modern turtle and he lives in the modern world and outright predators are a thing of the past. And there an awful lot of problems – like, say, rent – which not only do not go away by themselves but get much worse over time.

The turtle, sadly, is still sticking to his turtle-y ways, and continues to react to everything by zipping back into his shell. It has gotten so bad, in fact, that he is in his shell most of the time, and when he does have to deal with the big scary world out there, he only extends himself just barely enough to get the absolute minimm done, then zip!, he is back in his shell again.

If only our terrapin friend understood that the only way he will ever get out of his shell and be able to walk around in the sun like he used to do all the time is if he extends himself from his shell all the way and deals with the problems that plague him instead of fleeing from them all the time.

Hmmm. There’s a pretty good children’s book in there.

It would be especially good for the timid and/or anxious child.

Of course, it would have to end with our little friend – let’s called him Ted – learning not to zip into his shell all the time, and to stay out and deal with things instead.

Possibly with the help of a nonthreatening mentor character. An older turtle, maybe.

You know, I really am a magical creature. I sit at the keys and write and I never know what the heck is going to come out.

Hmmm. There could be another kid’s book about a magic toy box that has a new toy in it every day…..but sometimes, the toys are dark and scary.

I wonder if this is how Doctor Seuss started.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Hey there America! Listen… have you noticed that other countries (you… do remember that there’s other countries. right?) aren’t nearly as… you know../ INTO themselves as the USA is? Why do you suppose that is?

I will give you a minute to process these unfamiliar and alien thoughts related to actually comparing the USA to other countries rather than just acceping that the USA is the best at all things everywhere for all time.

Ready? Good. Good for yoyu.

Presumably, by now, you have arrived at the easy and politically correct answer, “Because nobody else is as awesome as America, duh!”

It would be easy at this point to question how you know this to be true. but I am not going to bother with that because for one, I get the feeling your answer will be “Because America!’ and that won’t get us anwhere, but mostly because I know this type of thinking (the thinking kind) is hard for you and I don’t want to overtax that small cluster of neurons you dedicate to thinking about others.

Other countries, that is. But that brings me to the point of all this.

I want you to imagine that you are at a party and have just met someone. Let’s call him Sam. And the first thing you noticed about Sam is that he has a really high opinion of himself. He is constantly talking abouit what a great guy he is, how he’s better than everyone else and how everyone wishes they were him and how he’s the strongest, the fastest, and the best at everything, and so forth and so on.

Sam is so pleased with himself, in fact, that he never misses an opportunity to sing his own praises. You would think he is very confident in himself.

But you’d be wrong. Because Sam reacts to even the slightest hint of criticism with a violent and bewildered outrage which quickly morphs into a blind rage that seeks to utterly annihilate the source of the criticism rather than actually answer it.

And that’s not how a secure person reacts, is it? If Sam was really as confident as he pretends to be, he would just shrug off the criticism.

But he can’t. It’s like criticism is very very painful to him.

Ever wonder why?

Here’s another thing about Sam : his home is in shambles. For all his bragging about how rich he is. he obviously cheaps out on the upkeep of his home. Everything is falling apart. The driveway is cracked and broken. The front lawn is three feet tall, half weeds, and burned brown at the top. Half the windows are broken and the ones that remain clearly haven’t been cleaned lately, possibly ever. The front door hangs off its hinges like a drunken man holding onto a telephone pole. The whole place stinks.

And that’s just what it looks like from the outside.

But worst of all is the kids. Because despite how much Sam talks about what an awesome family man he is, he obviously cheaps out on his kids too. They are all pale, underweight, and neglected. Sam spends as little as he can possibly get away with on his kids, and if they ask for more, he calls them socialists and parasites.

Sam says he’s the greatest guy around, and yet despite his wealth, he lives a far worse life than all his far poorer neighbors.

He’s a real piece of work, our Sam.

Now tell me : what do you think of Sam?

Do you think….,

A) that despite all the evidence, Sam really is as wonderful and amazing and superior as he says he is and is therefore a wonderful human being, or

B) that Sam is a horrible, obnoxious, monster of a person who is so full of shit it turned his eyes brown and needs to be taught a lesson in manners and common decency?

Because if you haven’t figured it out by now, the part is the world and Sam is you.

You are the obnoxious and far too aggressive angry guy who constantly sings his own praises while letting the nation you supposedly love fall apart because you just plain won’t pay to keep it together and when someone points his out, you act like this person is trying to steal your money.

And we in the rest of the world find your atttitude and behaviours just as appalling as you do Sam’s, and you look just as bad to the rest of the world as Sam does to you.

And you need to own this. American exceptionalism might feel good in the short term. but in reality, it’s just an excuse for laziness.

After all, if America gets the prize – thinking it’s the best -automatically, why would it put any effort into making it true?

That’s some seriously fucked up “participation award” thinking, America.

So consider this your intervention.

We just want you to kinow that,. as your international friends,. we are very worried about you. You have been in sharp decline lately and it hurts us to see you go down this self destructive path,. and abandon all the virtues, like courage, honor,. and a passionate dedication to do the right thing. that we have come to associate you.

I am sorry what I said above is so hard but I am trying hard to get through to you. So consider this the most loving of kicks to the ass.

Wake up, America. Rich people are stealing your money. Thieves, liars, and parasites are destroying everything you stand for. For far too long, you have accepted that you don’t get to have nice things that everyone else has, like universal healthcare and paid maternity leave. because the politicians say you can’t afford it.

But you can. You know this. You’re the richest country in the world, god dammit. If you put your minds to it, you can do anything.

So start standing up for yourself, America. Demand better government. Tell your politicians to fix up the placem or else. Shout down anyone who dares to suggest that the greatest country on Earth can’t do good things for itself.

And then put your money where your mouth is and pay for the America you deserve.

You can do it, America! I believe in you!

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am coming up with some awesome blog entry names lately, aren’t I?

Had therapy today. ^[1] And it was a good session kind of by accident.

I shall explain.

See, I forgot and/or neglected to eat before I left, so I had pretty low blood sugar going into my session today.

And that made me feel very raw and cold and vulnerable and numb. So a lot of that ended up kind of spilling out as I got talking.

This eventually led us to realize that maybe my Paxil dose of 50 mg is too high. That it makes me too numb and interferes with my healing.

I sure as hell have felt hella numb lately.

And trapped. Paralyzed. Like I want to get up, get moving, and get going. but the energies necessary are trapped at the bottom of a frozen lake and can’t escape.

So when I try to engage my motor, the engine just makes a horrible noise and then stops and shuts down again.

And I can feel the ice. In my veins, in my chest, in my hands. I can feel it like it is a physical coldness flowing through my veins.

Scientifically speaking, this must be engendered by a chemical imbalance of some sort. My therapist and I talked about serotonin versus noradrenaline. and how antidepressants that raise one suppress the other.

That made sense to me. After all, the idea is to fix a chemical imbalance. not cause one. So any antidepressant would have to maintain the same total of the two.

And who knows – my ice might be noradrenaline. Or something that does the opposite of the adrenaline response, anyhow.

It’s like there was a massive heat wave and I responded by installing air conditioning so powerful that it’s like winter in here.

I overcompensated, is what I am saying. And now I am stuck thawing myself out piece by piece and suffering through the long slow springtime of the soul when all I really want is a hot summer day to melt it all and bring the flood.

But how do you start the flood?

You surrender all form, all structure, all shape, and let yourself dissolve in the deep dark well of your own emotions.

It’s a lot like death.

But it isn’t death. It’s renewal. With form and structure and limitations gone, the soul is free to make the changes it needs in order to heal and evolve past its pain.

To transcend it, in other words.

I never believed in transcendence until quite recently. It was too abstract and undefined. What, exactly, was happening? How did it work? You have shown me the caterpillar and then the butterfly, but what happened in between?

But I get it now. Transcendence occurs when the energy of an emotional crisis is transformed into the energy needed to completely overcome a spiritual problem via the very sort of formless transformation I described above.

And without this possibility. we could never truly grow as people. Like a snake who can’t shed its skin, our growth only causes us more pain as we, in our blindness. struggle to hold ourselves together when what we really need is to fall apart.

Hence my repeated reference to feeling like I am barely holding myself together. Like I am a gut-shot soldier in a bloody and brutal war movie who has jammed his fist in the hole to keep his intenstines from spilling out.

Sorry for that harsh image, but it’s how I feel. I have a lot of darkness in me that needs to come out if I am to heal, and well, it ain’t pretty.

But maybe that is all wrong. Maybe what I should do is let it all go so I can ditch this goddamned coccoon and become the big beautiful butterfly I was meant to be.

Because seriously – fuck this chrysalis. My larval form ended a very long time ago and now it is time to stop fucking around and ducking the truth

I don’t tget to become a butterfly without having to become goo. Like I keep saying, for every butterfly born, a caterpillar dies.

From the caterpillar’s point of view, transformation is death. After all, that which emerges from the coccoon will be radically different from that which went in. The caterpillar will be gone forever.

If that’s not death, what is?

The answer is that it is only death if the caterpillar defines itself as “everything that I am right now, no matter how trivial”. I fthe caterpillar can expand its mind to the point where it can see that its true sell cannot die and that it will only be the illusions of self that will change, then the transformation can be seen as what it is : transcendence.

Or evolution, if you will.

And I think i am getting to the point where I am brave/reckless enough to initiate my transformation. It’s my usual sort of kamikaze bravery where I get to the point wheree I just plain don’t give a fuck about the consequences, I just want to dive into the deep dark pit and see what happens.

Banzai, motherfuckers. See you in Hell.

I find it funny that in order to be brave on a personal level, I have to essentially work myself up into a maniac frenzy. It’s the only way I know of to overcome my usually cautious and “sensible” nature.

Well actually, the other way is to get seriously pissed off by something. I am brave when I’m mad, too, or when I feel there is a real threat to me and mine.

Then the brahmin bull in me comes out and I go into Raging Ogre mode.

And I suppose those are the only moments when bravery is actually needed.

So I guess I am pretty brave after all.

When I have a reason to be.

Now I am going to lay down and think formless thoughts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is from before that meant “a way to save perfectly good food from ending up in the landfill because it wasn’t cosmetically perfect. “. AKA “freeganism”.

Don’t even get me STARTED on that.

No, I am talking about the original meaning. The Silicon Valley meaning. Back when I lived in that good old Silly Con Valley in the 90’s, “dumpster diving” meant going looking for perfectly good tech that some big corp was throwing out because they got a newer. slicker model or possibly just had no idea what was valuable tech because they were run by non nerds, known locally as “idiots”.

Oh no, it’s an ID10T error!

I bring up this hoary old subject because I did some recently.

See, something happened after therapy on Thursday. Namely, we discovered that the battery on Joe’s car was dead.

Uh oh spaghetti-os indeed.

Joe felt very bad about it. He attributed it to having left the keys in the ignition while he and Julian were waiting for me.

I don’t know enough about cars to know how probable that is. It could be true or it could be a case of the logical error post hoc ergo proctor hoc, AKA “this is what happened right before event A, therefore it caused event A”.

It is one of the more popular logic errors because when something sudden and impactful (usually something bad) happens the strength of our emotional response to the event really galvanizes the pattern seeking part of our mind, which then immediately links the two most recent events.

This is great if the impactful event is the sudden appearance of a sabre toothed tiger right after you step in some cabre toothed tiger poop, but in our complicated world full of complex stimuli, the associations formed can be downright nonsensical and create lasting problems for people.

An example from my own life : I am absolutely destroyed by the sound of a playground full of children playing. It’s more than a phobia and more than an anxiety attack. It’s like I am traveling backwards in time to when I was in elementary school and an awful lot of very bad things happened to me with that particular sound going on around me.

I know, intellectually, that whatever children I am hearing don’t even know I exist and are no threat to me anyhow as I am now ENORMOUS, but that kind of lmowledge does not make a trigger not a trigger any more.

And that is definitely one of mine.

Anyhow. Where was I? Oh right, dumpster diving.

So while we were waiting for the tow truck guy to come give us a jump start, I got out of the car to get some fresh air and enjoy a very lovely summer day.

And that’s when I noticed that there was this white peg-and-fabric box next to the dumpsters. So I wandered over to check it out.

Turned out, this was the local office build’s “e-waste” depository, where all the tech stuff that has to be recycled in a complex way goes.

And that’s when I realized I lived in a golden age of dumpster diving because it could be done without going near a smelly gross dumpster.

And in amongst the column style fans and printer/fax/copier combos I saw a laptop. So I grabbed that sucker.

And I was all ready to take it home. look it up, order a charger, and see if it worked, but then I realized the battery was missing, and laptop batteries are expensive and sometimes quite tricky to find, so I decided it wasn’t worth it and put it back.

It was then that I noticed that there was a smaller and far less impressive looking smooth white laptop in there as well, and it seemed to have its battery, so I figured, sure, it looks like a toy to me, but WTF.

Took it home. opened it up, and found out it was a MacBook.

Wow, my first Apple product! And I got it the best way possible : for free!

So I then looked all over the thing for a model number, or a series name, or any of the other things a lifelong PC user like me would used to identify a piece of tech.

But of course, this is the mysterious Land of Apple Products, where they assume that the inclusion of anything that… ugh… technical would fry their userbase’s brains right out their skulls, or at the very least send them shrieking into the night and seeking refuge in the nearest fabric and and fiber museum.

Let the soothing textures erase the evil memory of quantitative thinking.

So that threw me for a bit of a loop. Does not compute. so to speak. So I have been spending some time processing the whole deal.

And I have concluded that the only logical answer is that all MacBooks must use the same kind of charger. So sooner or later, I will look that up, and use the results of that to guide me to getting a charger for the dang thing.

And I know it’s a gamble. Might turn out the thing’s a total brick (another term from back then which means “totally nonfunctional tech”) and wouldn’t turn on if I hooked it up to a lightning rod and waited for a strike like in Frankenstein.

(I wonder if that’s a real last name? Because man would that suck. )

But what the hell, chargers are pretty cheap these days, and I might just get myself a (presumably ancient) MacBook out of the deal.

I figure that is worth the gamble. Even if it turns out it really IS a brick, I will have had the fun of acquiring it and anticipating the result.

The damn thing still looks like a toy to me – Baby’s First Laptop, or something.

But it’s toy that I could have a lot of fun with if I get it working.

And isn’t that what toys are for?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

For the record, I feel a bit better than normal today.

I want to record that fact because I know my depression has a way of erasing and/or negating that kind of truth. It hijacks the cognitive function that keeps the contents of our mind balanced and consistent to negate the truths that are not consistent with its darkness maximizing agenda.

It’s quite obscene, really. That there is a very strong function in my mind dedicated to killing anything that might make me happy or improve my self-esteem purely to protect the evil regime of my depression.

Well fuck that. I am burning those foul circuits out of my brain. And I am doing it with pure, potent, implacable contempt.

Hmmm. Once more, I set out to talk about something positive and instead a whole bunch of negativity came pouring out.

Well like I said before : better out than in.

I felt especially good this morning. Apparently,. playing Fallout 4 for six hours really hit the spot. I felt a lot more alive, awake, and emotionally warm than usual.

I think it was the result of simply expending enough of my pent up energies to clear the blockage for a while.

And that’s another thing I need to remember despite my depression’s evil agenda to make me forget : large quantities of energy expenditure are actually very good for me and when I feel down, I should look around for something I can really sink my teeth into.

Depression wants the opposite. It wants me to respond to feeling down by doing less, usually in the form of sleep.

And if depression wants it, it has to be bad, and I want to go the other way.

Another possible plus if that I had a very meaty meal last night. And it’s possible that this eventually corrected my extreme vitamin B-12 deficiency for a time.

Admittedly, that’s a long shot. The meaty feast and the feeling fab were like nine hours apart, and according to my doctor, my B-12 is so low because of a digestive issue and that means that no matter how much I take orally, it won’t get through.

That’s a depressing thought. Moving on.

---

That other world

I got this song recently and I really like it :

What’s more, it has given focus to my thoughts about that other world – the one where the happy healthy people live.

It first came to me as the thought that whatever universe John Denver songs take place in, I want to go there and live there forever.

I know why his music has such power over me as I age – it is an extremely strong dose of the exact opposite point of view from my usual dark musings.

Concentrated sunshine for the night-clad soul.

Plus, his music embodies the positive, wholesome, celebratory and joyful aspect of the Seventies, and that evokes those enormous waves of pure uncut nostalgia in me that overwhelm my defenses and swam my mind.

And that’s some powerful mojo there.

Especially when you consider that it is that very era in which the life-spring of my recovery – those precious first four years of my life before the rape – took place.

I am positive that it is those years that generate those sweeping waves of nostalgia. My mind is trying to heal itself by drawing on the one time in my life when I was not depressed at all.

That’s the one time when I lived in the sunlit world, before a stranger’s cock drove me deep underground into the sunless subterraneanTartarus that is depression.

So I find myself having a better notion of that sunlit world on an emotional level lately, and that might also be why I feel a little better today.

Because the stronger my connection to that other realm, the easier it is to imagine myself as not only being there but belonging there.

And that is super important.

Because as we’ve discussed before, I have a deep deep sense of shame and unworthiness, as if I was some horrible living toxin that doesn’t eve deserve to live yet alone stain the world of the healthy and the strong with my existence.

And that shit has to go, and that means opening my heart and letting the sunshine in.

And the thing is, that will hurt. When you are as sick as I am, the toxins of the soul do not go quietly, and the holy fever that burns the infection from my blood does not come without a certain amount of suffering.

It hurts to have this crap burned out of your blood and purged from your flesh. And the depression will protect itself by trying to convince you that said pain means it’s something that is bad for you and you should flee the light post-haste.

Thus, the disease convinces you to avoid its cure.

Well there are worse things than pain. I will gladly and proudly burn like a Roman candle on a starless night if that is what it takes to make myself whole and clean and strong again, like I was before the rape.

Bring the pain. I welcome it. I have seen beyond the illusion and now know that what hurts is not always what is bad and that even the pure clean sunshine of total love can be painful without it meaning that it was something bad pretending to be good.

Transcending pain is, I think, the beginning of the liberation of the soul. I’ve talked before about how maturity starts with the ability to choose pain in order to get the results that you want.

My go-to example being going to the dentist when you have a toothache. You know being at the dentist will be unpleqasant and painful, but it is the only way to get rid of your dental pain, so you go.

Well I think I understand that better now. It’s not just a matter of serving your long term best interests – in order to become truly human, we must move in the direction of our higher selves, and thus transcend the animal world of fleeing pain.

Some pain is worth it. It’s a truth many do not want to hear because they are trapped in the fantasy of a world where everything is easy, non-scary, and painless.

Liberation, therefore, begins when you can slap your chips down on the table. look life straight in the eye, and say “I know this will hurt. DO IT ANYWAY. ”

Life is suffering, as the Buddhists say.

So suffer. And live.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Trying hard to learn to be positive.

My hope is that if I try hard enough, I can reverse the downward spiral of my depression and turns it into something that lifts me up instead of pulling me down.

After all, healthy people stay more or less happy (at least compared to me) most of the time and don’t seem to be the victims of the terrible and terrifying gravity that holds me down and keeps me from getting anywhere.

That means that either/or they lack the gravity (depression) in the first place, or that said gravity is present in all people but in healthy people there is a countervaling (sp?) force that acts in the opposite direction and keeps things more or less “up”.

Again, at least as compared to me. I am certainly not suggesting that everybody but us depressives walks around in a constant state of bliss as if they wore a golden nimbus made of meadow sunshine and angel farts.

They just don’t have a black hole where their soul should be that sucks up all the love and joy and happiness inside and locks them away forever, leaving only a gaping wound behind where there should be flesh and blood and real human emotion.

Myself, I am such a queer duck (actually a pigeon with a fetish shhh) that if I ever catch myself feeling real, honest to goodness full on human emotions, it makes me incredibly happy because it means I am not entirely dead yet, and it feels so good to finally feel something for a change.

Even if it’s “negative”. Like I have mentioned before, many times, when you have been numb for along time that even the pins and needles pain of blood returning to a limb that’s fallen asleep is a blessed relief.

Because while pain hurts, it at least reminds me that I am alive and kicking,.

The numbness is just plain wrong. Wrong like a broken arm is wrong. You know something has gone drastically wrong in your body on such a deep animal level that all youir animal instincts are crying out for you to fix it somehow.

But you can’t fix it. Not like you would a normal wound. The wrongness persists and your body and mind are stuck in a constant struggle with it.

And I would gladly call the whole war off and tell both sides to go home without supper and think about what they have done.

But that’s impossible when one side is trying to annihilate the other.

Hmm. I started out talking about trying to learn to be positive and ended up releasing some of my negatives instead.

Well, better out than in. Sometimes, in order to let the sunshine in, you have to let the darkness out to make room.

People don’t get this, and that includes me most of the time. The gut-level reaction to a person being verbally negative is to interpret that as unhappiness and try to fix the problem when the only problem is the depressive is being misinterpreted.

Sometimes the best thing anyone can do for us is just sit and listen quietly, without interruption, while we disgorge whatever vileness is haunting us and thus exorcize an inner demon or two.

That’s a lot of what therapists do. They listen.

It’s odd (and tragic) that, as a global society, we are still so ignorant of people’s need to relate what has happened to them that we rarely are even cognizant enough to see that our own needs are met, let alone accomodate the needs of our loved ones.

Instead, we are so jaded from a constant diet of entertainment that we can only see our own thoughts and emotions through that filter, and tell ourselves that our thoughts and feelings don’t count as content because they are not entertaining enough.

The idea of this kind of communication having intrinsic value is alien to us.

I mean, how can something be worth anything besides what we can “get” for it?

Commercial consumer capitalism at its best, folks.

And so we keep things to ourselves because we don’t want to “bore” people with the mundane details of our lives, and we act as though for anyone to suggest that to be less than totally entertained for five minutes is akin to asking them for their heart, both kidneys, and their firstborn fetish.

I mean child.

Eh, either/or.

And so we end up locked up inside our self-centered individualist cul-de-sacs, not even knowing that there is a bigger, brighter, better world outside our cages if we only open up our hearts and souls to see it.

I am such a mystic poet. Especially for a rational materialist.

I think the millennials are fixing that, however. They travel in groups and are super into mutual consultation and do things like become bronies and do experiments in radical trust and all kinds of other things that warm my bitter. sullen Gen X heart.

I cling to the notion that our kids will learn from our mistakes and reach out to one another to create community and mutuality and other great stuff like that.

It’s all very Seventies, come to think of it.

History really does repeat itself.

But things do get better.

I feel like I need to have that playing in my head on an infinite loop. Things can and do get better. It just happens in a way that we can’t see because we are inside the vehicle as it changes and lack the vision to see it from an outside point of view.

I am one hundred percent sure that I am the first person to ever say this breaktakingly original thought : what the world needs is a spiritual awakening.

But not the kind they sell at the various variations of revival tent meetings that take place all over the world. This is not about finding Jesus or whoever. This is not about repenting for our supposed sins. This is not a violent awakening.

It’s more like waking up from a pleasant and restoring afternoon nap on a beautiful summer day and looks out the window at the sunshine and the grass and the big blue sky and realizing that the world is a pretty wonderful place after all.

Amen and pass the lemonade.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I haven’t the slightest idea what I want to write about tonight.

Total blank. Mi cabeza esta vacia. My caboose is loose and out of juice.

I got nuthin’. Is what I am saying.

But I am not worried about it. I know that if keep writing, eventually something will either occurr to me or emerge organically on its own.

I have a nigh-infinite sea of words within me. It’s just a matter of letting them out.

Still struggling with the challege of successfully motivating myself in a way that my super evil superego can’t corrupt and turn into yet another thing to hate myself for.

Either that, or I need to develop a stubborn, thick skinned, “fuck you and everyone who looks like ya” attitude about the whole thing. Tell my superego to fuck off because I am going to do the things which are good for me no matter what.

That’s a very intriguing thought. And it makes sense. The most elegant solution to the tyranny of my fascist superego is not to fight it but to ignore its hysterical and dishonest attacks on my self worth and carry on nevertheless.

And it seems doable. It will take a fair bit of psychological manuevering to get myself into the right mindspace to do it, but I got time.

I got nuthin’ BUT time.

So let’s kick it off affirmation style.

I hereby declare that my evil, scheming, corrupt, dishonest. sabotaging, subterfuging, incompetent prosecutor of a superego can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut because I have HAD IT with its oppressive regime and I am hereby KICKING IT OUT OF OFFICE and replacing it with my far more reasonable and gentle desire for knowledge and the truth and spiritual growth for as long as it takes to recruit, train, and prepare a competent replacement.

Assuming we think we need one. We may not even bother.

You, my super evil superego, are now and have always been terrible at your job. Your prosecutions were filled with lies, distortions. corruption, perfidy, and straight out delusions, and wouldn’t hold up in even the dumbest court in the world.

Not only that, all your dire warnings and apocalyptic predictions have been completely absurd. Not a single one of them would survive the light of day. The only reason you got away with it as long as you did is that you installed yourself so deep into the workings of my mind that your insane drivel rotted my mind away in the dark, far away from the pure clean light of reason and plausibility.

Well consider this your motherfucking eviction notice, because you are OUT OF HERE.

Because despite all you have said about me, I’m actually a pretty amazing guy. Sweet, funny, nice, lovable, and cute – that would be enough for a lot of people.

The fact that in addition, I am also hyperintelligent and super talented almost seems unfair. Should anyone get that much potential?

Yes. But only if it’s me.

So get packing, demon of mine. Consider yourself exorcised. I am ridding myself of you like the diseased polluted filth you are by dissolving you, concentrating you, then eliminating you along with all the other toxins I have accumulate.

Say hi to the kidneys on your way out.

Or if that’s too gross, imagine instead that I have taken you off my sky altar, held you up to the sky as an offering, and a bolt of cleansing fire from the heavens has set your horrific carcass alight and rendered you into nothing but smoke and clean ash.

Point is, you are dead, and soon you will be gone.

Alll this time that you made me feel like I was a horrible, nasty, disgusting thing, you were really talking about yourself. You are the nasty one. You are the diseased one. You are the weak plasied leper, not me.

Me? I am fine. Amazing, really. I am a master wizard and you are just something unpleasant I conjured up a long time ago for presumably a very good reason that has long since become an obsolete liability I no longer wish to carry.

SO consider this your evication notice. Your divorce papers. Your corrective surgery to remove a large metastatic lump from my brain.

You are gone, motherfucker.

And I never want to see you again.

---

Hmm. I had a really cool way I was going to end that piece but then I forgot it.

No surprise there because I am very sleepy for some reason. Maybe it’s the fact that I just had supper, I don’t know. But right now I am hardcore craving the nap I am going to take when I am done here like a starving man craves a cheeseburger.

Unless he’s a vegan. In which case he only craves the sweet release of death.

That was a joke, vegans. Don’t get your hemp panties in a bunch.

The good thing is that it is the good kind of sleepy. The kind that feels relaxing and inviting, like a warm bath. Like I am going to sleep really well.

That’s way better than the bad sort of sleepiness, where it feels more like a heavy weight pushing me into sleep like it’s holding my head underwater to drown me. Or like tentacles rising from below to pull me under.

Either way, I am drowning. It’s an apt metaphor for sleep apnea as well as an evocative image to get the point across.

I stop breathing many times when I sleep. Might as well be drowning. I even wake up wet from all the sweating.

I wish I was healthy enough to deal with my health issues. It’s a really Catch-22 kind of situation. If I were healthier, I would be able to make myself healthier.

But I’m not.

So I don’t.

And sooner or later, that will straight up fucking kill me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.