Realized that the feeling like I am never ever doing what I am supposed to be doing had crept back into my life.

No surprise there. I predicted it the last time I was at this point of realization, even. I knew the odds of my changing the pattern were low.

Because the sad truth is that it is the only way I know how to live. My life only makes sense to me when I am hiding like a villain from a powerful feeling of error, inadequacy, and underlying it all a deep and terrible shame.

I wish I could ditch the shame. I don’t have anything to be ashamed of.

I don’t have to be ashamed of my total lack of life progress – I have been quite ill for my entire adult life. In many ways, it’s impressive that I have made it this far without ended up in the psych ward for either doing seriously crazy shit when my depression makes me so numb that I will do anything just to FEEL SOMETHING^[1], or because I attempted suicide and somebody noticed.

But no. My depression would never allow that. It’s entire mandate is to hide me from the world so I will be “safe”, and therefore I am not allowed to do anything crazy because that would only attract attention and maybe even the sort of serious sustained medical attention that would threaten the depression’s whole regime.

So instead, I just make it through every day the best I can while the clock ticks on any attempt I might make to get an actual fucking life.

Thank goodness nobody really cares how old an author is. At least in “print”. ^[2] I could be seventy years old and confined to a sickbed and as long as I can write the sort of things people like to read, I have a chance.

And I can. I write things people find hilarious and delightful. I need to remember that.

But that’s the trick, isn’t it? How to appreciate all my considerable gifts without it turning into that feeling like I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing. ^[3]

After all, if I have all these gifts, then I should be using them, shouldn’t I? Why, it’s a crime to let such talents go to waste. I should be ashamed of myself!

Oh, I am. And it just makes me avoid dealing with the whole situation all the harder.

It’s such a tricky, fussy thing to try to disarm. No wonder I go long periods without even trying very hard to free myself. I am so goddamned sick and tired of getting my fingers burned every time I try.

Clearly some kind of paradigm shift is needed. I think the last time I discussed this, I had the idea that I should just get used to my overweaning superego’s punishments.

Endure it. Tell my superego to go fuck itself, because I am going to do whatever gets me ahead no matter what you do.

Signed, my weak but feisty id.

That would certainly upset the applecart and piss off the mustard wagon.

That would involve, essentially, manning up. Getting over myself. Conquering the demon who guards the first gate to adulthood, Fear of Pain.

It’s a testament to the progress we have made as human beings that the modern person can have such a fear.

In previous, more primitive eras, pain was part of everyday life and there was little to no way to avoid it. Those people who could not adjust to that were selected out by evolution and, presumably, starved to death.

But we have done such a magnificent job of making our lives more pleasant and less painful that now, fear of pain can not only exist but thrive.

How many people today are stuck in dead-end lives that do not make them happy at all simply because they refuse to do whatever painful, unpleasant, scary, or “weird” thing it would take to get them out of it?

Besides me, that is?

Answer : plenty. People are all bottled up by pain our ancestors would not even notice. It’s an unintended side effect of progress.

Turns out all those unreconstructed macho types are not entirely wrong when they talk about people getting too soft and wimpy.

They just completely miss what the problem is with that. It’s not the failure to live up to some macho ideal that is the problem.

The problem is that being wimpy makes your life suck. You would be much happier if you got tougher and stronger. That’s what it is all about.

But the people delivering the message don’t get that and so they completely fail to convince us modern creampuffs that they are anything but sadomachoistic.

If someone had made the case for me when I was young that if I push through difficult and unpleasant things in order to get what I want, said things would become easier over time as I toughened up, I might have had a very different kind of life.

It’s the hedonist’s argument for self-discipline and the cultivation of strength, and it actually makes a hell of a lot of sense.

These people are not sadomachoistic. Just inarticulate.

As it stands in my life now, I am ever so slowly moving in the direction of seeking and acquiring strength in all its forms. Courage, health, toughness, horsepower, and the deep down irrational stubbornness that refuses to back down or quit no matter what.

Just to name a few.

Only by gathering and preserving strength can I acquire what it takes to pull my life out of this decades long rut and get my life going somewhere again.

I don’t know where I will find it.

And I don’t know what to do with it once I do.

But I know what I am looking for now, and that’s some major progress right there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here I am again, ready to burn.

I have been getting increasingly frustrated and irritable lately. It’s bee n building for quite some time. I have the urge to snap at people for the tiniest of things.

I don’t do it, of course. I refuse to take my bad mood out on others. That’s what my Dad did, and I vowed to never become him.

But I get the urge. A lot.

So I figure this has all been building to another season of roasting in my own fires and feeling the burn as it both torments and cleanses me.

Fire cleanses all. Good, clean fire. It burns away the impure, and leaves only that which is strong and solid and worthy.

I am not crazy.

I’ve been thinking “I hate my life” a lot lately. That’s never a good sign. Generally means my background irritatiom level has risen to the point that it doesn’t take much of a disturbance to make it splash over into my conscious mind as frustration, aggravation, and general agitation.

But I refuse to reject or suppress this anger. That would be foolhardy – suppressed emotions wreak havoc on the psyche as they struggle to be heard.

It would also be a waste, because anger is energy and energy is something I desperately need. I may not be happy but at least I am activated and that means there is at least a possibility of getting something or other done.

I just have to let it all build up inside of me until video games just don’t cut it any more and my mind and body demand I do something harder.

Something where I feel the strain. Something that stretches my capacities. Something that burns off some of the excess energy in the system instead of just letting it lurk their latently until it becomes depression.

I am sick of anger turned inwards. I don’t fucking deserve it. I am one hell of a guy. Funny, sweet, talented, kind, compassionate, and intelligent as FUCK.

It’s quite the package, really.

I deserve a way better life than the invalid one I live now.

But when i try to reach out beyond my current limitations and truly come alive, that sad little voice inside me says “no. ” and I turn away from the light and weep inside.

It’s my damage, I guess. The actual deep psychic wounds caused by being raped by a stranger at the age of 4. That experience left a deep and terrifying scar that runs all through my psyche.

In fact, my whole psyche is structured around it. Like I am wrapped up in a tight ball around the wound. The idea is to keep the world away so the world can’t hurt me again or aggravate the wound.

But the cost is far too high.

For one thing, it keeps me from being able to deal directly with reality. On a psychological level, I am always facing inwards, and trying to deal with reality by lookign at a mirror tilted in just the right way.

No wonder I am so clumsy, and I get so confused by things like left and right.

I am seeing only the mirror image of life.

For another, my defenses do such a good job of protecting the wound that it has never healed. How could it? It’s hermetically sealed behind a wall of glass.

Nothing living can survive that.

No wonder I don’t feel like I am really alive. Instead, I feel like a ghost i my own life. I feel like nothing I ever do matters. Or counts. Or means a god damned thing.

I am a prisoner serving a life sentence for someone else’s crime. I did nothing wrong – something wrong was done to me. But I am the one crippled for life by it.

There ain’t no justice.

Oh, but it gets worse. You see, the nature of my illness has made it very hard for me to seek treatment for it. It made me shy and passive and a very poor advocate for myself.

It made me isolate myself to the point where I barely existed and suffer without treatment apart from meds for many, many years because I did not have the strength or courage to ask for anything.

Asking for things is hard for me. The desire to disapper and not be noticed screams at me the entire time that I should not be doing this, that I should not be drawing attention to myself at all,let alone actually expecting anything of anyone ever.

My childhood made it clear to me that I deserved nothing except food, shelter, and the bare tolerance of my existence.

You know, as long as I didn’t remind anyone I was still there. So I had to be very quiet and unobtrusive and never, ever ask for anything and do everything I could to maintain the illusion that my parents only had three kids.

You know, the planned ones. The ones that were wanted. The ones who had already divvied up all the love, attention, and resources among themselves and weren’t going to relinquish one iota of anything of it in order to deal me in.

And I sure as hell wasn’t strong or confident enough to demand it. Or even politely request it. I grew up being grateful for whatever boons happen to fall out of the sky for me because my parents happened to remember me that day.

No wonder I feel like I am not really here.

It’s how I was raised.

I can’t remember ever feeling like I was equal to my siblings in any way. It was very clear that there was them, and me. They got parental attention as a matter of course, not as an afterthought. They got support as well, almost as if they were worth somethbing to my parents.

Me? I got nothing.

It’s what I deserved.

There is more I could sat about my stupid fucking life, but I am tired.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Was Therapy Thursday today. Had a decent session.

I did most of the talking. All in all, that’s a good thing. To me, therapy is most about getting stuff out of my mind by expressing them, much like this blog, and so a session where my shrink resists his urge to jump in and argue with me is a good one.

I seem to bring that out in people. I think it’s because the whole package – my strontg presence, my emotive strength, my powers of verbal expression, and so on – subconciously gives people the feeling like I am trying to overwrite the contents of their mind and they therefore have to argue just to maintain their identity.

As evidence, I site the dozens of times in my life people have said things like “you argue like there’s no chance you are wrong^[1]” or “I have the right to my own opinion!^[2] ” or “what makes you such an expert?^[3]” when as far as I can tell, we’re just talking about stuff like all the other humans.

They probably wouldn’t phrase it like that, though.

Presumably, in an alternate timeline, maybe one where I did not get raped at the age of 4, I realized at an early age that I could use my powers of persuasion to make money and ended up a rich ad exec or something.

But in this, our current univers, I ended up with a personality singularly unsuited to exploit those powers. I am far too sensitive and responsible to victimize people like a con man would,. even in more legal forms like finance. I get no thrill from the idea of controlling people and having them under my thumb.

Just seems like too much responsibility to me. I mean, once you have them, you have to take care of them and look out for them and I am already gone, man.

And sure, I am as greedy for cash as anyone else. But not to the point where it supplants my morality.

Nothing supplants my morality.

So in a broad sense, I suppose I am an Amish tech genius.

I have the skills, but I won’t ever use them.

What else… oh, right after therapy,. I had an appointment for wound care at the Richmond Medical Sciences Center, or as locals refer to it, “that building across the street from the hospital”.

Technically, that could refer to two different locations because the hospital faces two different streets. I had to learn which one it was via context.

Being very precise with words is occasionally a liability in this inarticulate world. Especially when you have one tiny toe on the autism spectrum and thus have a tendency to take things literally when under stress.

I did not come to that self-diagnosis lightly. And it’s a highly tentative and qualified one at that. There are just some things about me and my history that don’t make any sense unless you add some sort of social disability to the equation.

Like all those times I have felt that people expected something of me that I desperately wanted to give them but could not.

Presumably, normal people pick up some kind of cue from others that tells them what response is needed and things go smoothly onwards from there.

But my antenna is busted, and I ain’t picking up jack shit. Lucky me.

One thing discussed in therapy today was my feeling that when I was raped, I pull myself into my mind so hard that it did serious social damage on all levels.

The image in my mind was one of having been at the site of an explosion that burned me deep all over and the skin came back but not the nerves.

So I look normal. But I don’t feel the world like other people do.; I can’t feel the warmth of the lover of others or the feeling of social connection or even the simple happiness of being around people.

Instead, I trudge on endlessly, naked and alone in the dark and dying of the cold. The cold which nothing can relieve because the signal just can’t get through.

Just miles and miles of Siberian winter, till the day I die,.

I’d like to think it’s possible that my social damaged can still be healed, even at the age of 46. That if I found the right social environment,. one where I feel appreciated and useful and accepted, and got me the positive social input I need to counter all the bad social input I got as a child,. that I could come to life and join humanity and leave the cold dark tundra behind me.

So I still hold out hope. I don’t know how to find such an place. I suspect it would involve being around people who are a hell of a lot healthier than me so that I could learn from them and absorb their good vibes and happiness.

Part of me would fight that. So part of my therapy would be to fight or at least restrain that part of me.

I have felt toxic and filthy and broken and wrong for so long that my system attacks anything pure and wholesome and good like it’s a foreign invader.

They would have to be particularly nice and patient people because they would have to deal with my not fitting in right away and all my awkward vibes and weird corners.

But I would be willing to fully submit to such an environment. Do what they do, saw what they say, act as they act.

It’s not like my ferocious individualism has ever done me any good.

Maybe I should learn to go along to get along for once.

It’s not like it could make things worse.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s talk about Bob.

Bob is your average male adult citizen of a democracy. He has just received a piece of information that conflicts with his political views.

There are two possible ways to respond to this input :

A. Accept the input and change his views accordingly, or

B. Reject the input in order to maintain not just the belief but his own emotional and intellectual stability and integrity.

But rejection of this information is no mere act of will. Bob can’t just wish it away. After all, not even very intellectually compromised people can reject new information without some kind of justification.

That would be too much like consciously lying to yourself, and that dog don’t hunt. It is impossible for the human mind to knowingly believe what it knows not to be true.

So there has to be a process for negating the information. One way is to come up with well reasoned arguments as to why the information must be false.

But not everyone has that much brainpower to spare. The average person, in fact, just wants to get through their daily lives without spending a lot of time contemplating.

And that leads us to the real topic of today’s discussion : the means by which they negate the input they do not like.

They simply invent whatever information they need to refute it.

And then believe it.

It’s both horrifying and, in a sick way, fascinating.

Let’s go back to Bob. Let’s say Bob believes that everyone on welfare is a lazy bum mooching off the system. And in conversation with friends, he says this.

But then someone says they were on welfare for a year and they looked for jobs the whole time, and now they are successful and paying back into the system as a hard working taxpayer.and parent.

This is Bob’s moment of (un)truth. He could change his mind. But that’s scary and a lot of work. He goes with plan B instead.

In this case, plan B means Bob says. “Well, yeah, sure, but I saw this family in line at the grocery store wearing mink coats and buying steak and lobster and laughing at what suckers we all were for paying for it all. ”

THIS NEVER HAPPENED. EVER. Bob categoricall and definitively has never had an experience even remotely like this.

But because his friends have views similar to his, they accept this story as true despite its cartoonish absurdity.

And because they all believe it, now Bob believe it too. He now honestly believes this happened. Sure, a small part of his mind retains the fact that he made it up, but otherwise his imagining it happening is now equivalent to a memory of it happening.

If his friends had laughed and rejected it, it would not have become this pseudo-memory. But because they now believe it, and Bob has always taken his views from those around him in his efforts to fit in,. it’s now OK for him to believe it too.

For him, this was a successful social interaction. He fit in. He got positive feedback from his peer group. They all verified what they had in common this way.

Whether or not it is literally true is not particularly important.

And the thing is, Bob and his friends will now tell this story to other likeminded people, who, like bob’s friends, will also accept it as true because it fits with their existing views.

In fact, in this hyper-connected day and age, Bob’s completely ficticious (but believed) story can quickly spread all over the internet in a matter of minutes and be added to the arsenal of arguments right wingers use to justify their positions.

Right wing media’s job is to perform this same function on a mass media scale. Fox News works hard to find all the best ways to tell its viewers everything they need to know in order to suppress any and all facts they don’t like.

This provides the vital service of keeping their viewers safe from their moral enemy, doubt. A state of doubt terrifies conservatives and they want out of it ASAP, and are therefore not that fussy about what exit route they take.

It is, fundamentally, the resolution of an emotional state, not a function of logic, and therefore cannot be blunted or prevented via logic.

And once you know this, it is easy to see how enormous swathes of patently insane and absurd (and sometimes downright evil) beliefs are maintained in the right wing world.

Not that this is an exclusively right wing phenomenon. Bob could just as easily been a liberal hearing something good about nuclear power and inventing a news story about how that technology they were talking about is hyper toxic and made of baby seals and the tears of elephants.

However, I chose to lead with right wing examples because I think that’s the intellectual rot that is threatening the world at the moment. Modern conservatism has become an entire alternate reality as fictional as Narnia or Westeros, and that is largely because in this age of information, right wing beliefs become harder and harder to maintain and therefore require larger and larger departures from reality.

This puts a lot of strain on the right wing media and right wing politics in general. Reality continues to invade no matter how hard they work to keep it out. The kind of strongly emotional button-pushing rhetoric they normally use to club their reason into submission is not cutting it any more because Trump and his ilk have gotten so damn bad that even Fox News can’t explain it away.

When you say, “Go back to where you came from!” to 4 women, three of whom are American citizens, it’s hard for your followers to pretend that isn’t racist.

So even Fox News is starting to break down. They have no choice but to ask the usual pundits the tought questions at least some of the time because their audience is struggling with those very same questions.

And they are asking them in a way that reflects their struggle to find some kind of sanity in it all. Some kind of limit to how far this madness will take them.

And I find that very encouraging. This must be part of how a generation of conservatism finally breaks down. It breaks down when the masses, who have swallowed everything so far, are finally fed someone they simply cannot tolerate.

Only then do they finally have the strength to reject it.

And that honestly makes me want to give them a great big hug.

No “I told you so”. that will just chase them back to Trump.

These people are deeply unhappy and looking for a new source of safety.

Let’s be that source for them!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I definitely feel like my consciousness leveled up when I realized that my faith that you are always better off knowing the truth was just that : faith.

Not reason or logic or any sort of rational belief. Logic does not support this very foundational belief of mine.

After all, anyone with an imagination and a IQ above room temperature can come up with scenarios where you are definitely not better off knowing the truth.

For an off the cuff example, imagine that someone has been in a terrible accident and the only thing that will save their life is a risky and terrifying operation.

Like, they are going to take this guy’s entire brain out of his head, or something.

Then the patient regains consciousness, which is fine as long as they stay calm. Any rise in blood pressure, however, could kill them.

Are you going to tell them the truth that will probably kill, or lie and say that everything is fine and that they are just going to go back to sleep for a while and after that everything will be back to normal?

I get the feeling most people’s examples would be less imaginative and less gruesome.

Ah well, c’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

Anyhow…. my point (I do have one) is that my belief that I was always better off with the truth was not based on reasons so much as hope. Hope and a vague sense that I was probably better off knowing the truth more times than not.

That is a logical model known to statisticians as “guessing”.

In fact, in the final analysis, it seems to me that my faith in the truth was based mostly on the fact that my personality and cognitive style leaned in that direction anyhow, so I might as well spin that as a good thing.

I have always had a very analytical mind that relentlessly sought answers. I was, after all. the kid who found out Santa didn’t exist by bombarding my siblings with so many highly on-point questions that there was no way they could maintain the illusion and had to admit Santa was not real. It was just Mom and Dad.

To be honest, that was a huge relief. The world made sense again.

So no matter what, I was going to relentlessly seek the truth like a shark on the hunt. My belief that I am always better off with the truth, then, seems like that selfsame shark grandly proclaiming that the best food in the world is sushi.

Well what else was he gonna eat? Barbecue?

This error of faith seems relatively minor. Our society favours truth, at least in the abstract. Honesty is a virtue. We tell people to be realistic about things. Most people would agree that you’re better off with the truth than a lie most of the time.

And taken in that context. it is minor. But there is an underlying truth that represents something far more dire.

A inability to ever shield oneself from the truth.

I have made noises before about how a truly rational, logical person must be naked before the truth, without reservation or defense, and that sure sounds noble and brave and exactly what Western society teaches us to believe.

It’s also how someone like me boasts about what an intellectual badass they are.

That’s almost adorable. Sad, but adorable.

But for the most part, it’s feckless bullshit. All volts, no current. Sure, it sounds good, but any serious attempt to implement it will fail.

The human psyche is simply not capable of living like that.

That’s why most people have a certain amount of bullshit in their lives. Things that are not strictly true but that they have to belive in order to keep their psyche stable and their self-worth in functional shape.

This universaility of bullshit is something I have known all my life. To me, with my unusual mind, it was obvious that people protected themselves from the sharp corners and rough edges of life with beliefs that were not supportable by reason.

Of course, they didn’t know this. That would have defeated the whole purpose of it. This only worked if the person’s metaconsciousness could fool the conscious mind into accepting the beliefs without questioning them.

And as far as I can tell, that works perfectly well for most people.

But then there’s mental mutants like myself. I was born with that relentless hunger for the truth and the constant demand that thinjgs fit together and make sense before I can accept them as real.

This temperament makes self-delusion like I have been describing quite tricky. I think it’s the main thing that has kept me from developing the psychological defenses I see in others, and I think that has hurt me terribly in the long term.

Turns out that when you’re naked before the truth, you get real cold. Go fig.

I have little to no ability to shield myself from the dark truths of the world. I don’t have that little shard of consciousness that intercepts information on the way in and deflects, diffuses, or even destroys the stuff that will be injurious to the psyche.

I soak it all up like a sponge and add it to my worldview, without exception.

And sure, that leads to an interior world that’s cold as hell, but I have taught myself to ignore the cold, or see it as a good thing.

It just proves how much better I am than other people. You know, that I am not a delusional wimp like them.

And that’s all well and good, right?

Except, oh wait, I am crazy and miserable and full of pain.

Kind of suggests there might be something I have overlooked.

Like that sometimes cold comfort is just plain not enough. And that this hard edged mind of mine cuts me up and cuts me down far more than it hurts anyone else. And that the path to feeling truly alive and real is not one that can be predicted or planned, and it definitely cannot be verified.

To recover, then, is to risk believing things which are not “true.”

Now I am going to lie down and think about that for a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In many ways, I feel like I am struggling to be born.

For many years, I was merely an embryo of a very advanced age. All those years living day to day, spending all my time online and playing video games and being a semi-good roomate to whoever was keeping me, I never ever thought about the future because it scared the hell out of me to even try.

When I tried to think about the future, all I saw in my mihnd was a TV tube tuned to this slate grey void and a tgerrifying feeling of dread and despair.

I didn’t really start being born till I finally found my voice long enough to ask my GP, Doctor Chao, to find me a therapist.

That was so hard to do. And it took me so long to get there.

He hooked me up with my psychiatrist, Doctor Costin, and it’s through seeing him that I began the long and painful process of birth.

No embryo wants to leave the womb. But it can’t stay there forever. Not if it hopes to grow and change and become a real person.

And I have been seeing Doc Costin for five years now. A long birth indeed. And it’s thanks to him and his therapeutic skills that I ended up going to Kwantlen and then VFS. So some of that being born has definitely happened.

But by no means all of it. I won’t be fully born until I graduate out of this gulag of mine and get a job and a boyfriend and can pay my own way for once.

After all, you can’t stop being an embryo if you continue to cling to your umbilicus. I won’t get to be a real boy until I can cut the cord and live and breathe on my own.

Until then, the days will just keep on passing by and I will continue to feel like I am floating in aspic, unable to touch or feel anything directly, living on what little human warmth can penetrate the walls of my icy womb.

Therapy awoke my inner spark. It did this by slowly removing enough of the accumulated garbage in my mind that it could finally get enough oxygen to oxidize and provide a tiny bit of warmth of my own.

I have been jealously and zealously guarding that little spark for years. It is my pilot light and I worry that the universe wants to snuff it out, and with it, my hopes.

Not rational. So what.

I want to do more. I want to use that spark to light a fire within me that can melt my blood and organs and thaw out my scarred and rusty heart and finally let me know what it is like to be truly alive.

But my timber is still too wet. The spark won’t catch. The spark plug doesn’t fire. So I either need to dry out my wood faster or find a superior source of ignition.

Come on, baby. Light my fire.

---

It just occurred to me that a lot of my unwillingness to truly open up to people and share my pain with them is because I can’t keep them safe if I do that.

I want them to be safe. It’s important to me. If I care about someone, I want them to be safe and healthy and happy and content.

Loosing my demons upon them is the opposite of that.

I’ve talked about this in this space before: how I feel like that which I have locked up inside me, all my pain and horror and so, so much isolation, is far too dangerous to ever let loose on some poor person.

Even if that person is my therapist. More’s the pity.

And maybe that whole deal is bullshit. Maybe that’s just my depression’s go-to reliable trick for keeping me from releasing any of its toxins and thus taking away its power.

Maybe my bullshit is no worse (or better) than anyone else’s.

Maybe that’s what I am afraid of- that my pain is not special and that were I to loose my demons on an unsuspecting world, the world would just shrug and say “So what?”.

But it can’t be all that because I know how greedy-needy I am inside and how badly the deep dark evil part of me wants to just reach out and take whatever the hell I want, and to hell with the consequences for others.

And I know that if I open up to people, my power of personality, facility with words, and strong emotive capacities will amplify and focus the message into a Wave Motion Gun of communicative destruction.

The things I need to express have been around for a very long time, and have only grown more toxic and deadly over the years.

Of course, that could be bullshit too.

But it’s how I feel so it’s what I have to deal with in order to make any progress.

I am still probing the limits of rationality. I have gotten far enough that I am willing to admit that my emotions know things and I can only learn these things if I listen to them without forcing them into the straitjacket of that which can be justified logically.

I am still very uncomfortable with the idea of venturing outside the brightly burning light of my rational mind, but I at least agree that it is a trip worth making.

Any minute now. Seriously.

And again, I wish I could just rip the band-aid off and be done with it. That I could just open the door between my emotional self and my reason and tell them both to do what they gotta do, I’ll be taking a nap.

There must be some way I can learn to feel the world. Not just process, analyze, rationalize, and store it. That’s all too cold.

I need to truly feel it, emotionally and spiritually. No more chilly reserve. No more smug detachments. No more acting like I am not a part of things.

I am here, I am real, and I am alive.

And I am evr so ready to be born.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The sunshine felt amazing on my wounds.

Well, I told myself, they do say sunshine is the best disinfectant, and laughed.

It had taken me many hours of soul-ripping agony crawling through tunnels barely big enough for me to fit through and backtracking after hitting dead end after dead end to finally get my broken bleeding self to the surface of this wonderful hellhole of an asteroid, and now I was lying on a nice warm rock letting my solar cells recharge and basking in the glory of my achievement, otherwise known as the endorphine high you get after extereme exertion.

Once a biologist, always a pain in the ass about everything, said a voice in my head.

Yeah whatever. Knowing how things work never stopped me from enjoying them. And man, am I enjoying this high.

God knows I deserve it after what I’ve been through.

I decide to extend the buzz by thinking about how all my enemies think I’m dead. That always brings a big ol’ smile to my face.

Because of course, nobody could survive a crash like that. And if they did, there’s no way they could survive long on that barren, lifeless hunk of rock.

And the thing is, that’s almost right. No normal person could survive any of that. But then again, normal has never been my strong suit.

See, what they don’t know is that I happen to have an extensive suite of very expensive, super powerful, and extremely illegal implants all through my body, and those are what have allowed me to surive.

The ones near my heart threw up a force cage of great power and extremely short duration at the moment of impact.

The ones in my lungs are cleaning and recirculating the air I breathe.

The ones between my fourth and fifth vertebrae are projecting the skin tight passive-stable force field that is maintaining normal air pressure around me so I don’t explode.

And the fist-shaped one between my testicles contains a computer with the highest computational density known to man feeding its information directly into my nervous system as it controls and coordinates all the other implants.

That means one thing and one thing only : I am literally thinking with my balls now.

That amuses the hell out of me.

And the best part is, I know that nobody knows about the implants but me because if they did, they would all be hunting me like I had all three colors of the plague. Whole navies would be dispatched to hunt me down and kill me on sight.

That’s how bad anti-Enhancement hysteria has gotten. Having even the tiniest implant carries a trial-free death sentence on 80 percent of the planets in the League. On the rest, the best possible outcome is being stripped of all implants and thrown into some kind of dead-end mental health facility to rot till I die.

Besides, the guy who did all my implants is dead.

I should know, because I killed him for an entirely unrelated reason.

So I now have the glorious experience of knowing that absolutely nobody in the universe knows that I am alive.

The time between now and when they finally figure it out is gonna be SO MUCH FUN.

---

I don’t want to think about what all that pain did to me.

Not physically. Physically I will be fine. Now that my implants have all the solar energy they could ever want, I know I am going to be just fine despite having, according to diagnostics, several ruptured organs and burns on every inch of skin left.

It might take a while, but my implants will set everything right.

No, I am mostly worried about what that pain did to my soul. My moral being. I had to dig pretty deep to get to the surface, and I know that shit doesn’t come without a cost.

Surprised that someone the news describes as, variously, a “terrorist”, a “monster”. a “pirate” and “the most evil man alive” is worried about his moral being?

Well the truth is that I am a very moral man. Everything I do is in service of my deep seated sense of right and wrong.

And I bet that for the most part, mine is the same as yours.

Or at least it used to be.

I have run my own sort of diagnostic on my morality, and the prognosis is not good. I have tried elicit tender emotions by thinking about all the people I know I should care deeply for – my wife, my husbands, my kids, my “pirate” pals, even my childhood friends – and all I feel for them is a cold contempt and the barest flicker of a kind of detached pity, the kind you feel when you read about a disaster far, far away.

Weaklings, all of them. Worthless wastes of time, space, and skin. Random conglomerations of carbon compounds as meaningless to me as ants on a hill.

That…. is very far from how I usually feel.

I probe myself for any kind of moral feeling. And at first I get nothing. Null set. All readings at 0. And a terrible panic begins within me at the thought of a future with nothing but reptile instincts to guide me.

But at long last, I find my highest, most transpersonal ethics more or less intact. I still want people to live and thrive and for civilization to keep stumbling forward. If I could prevent a disaster, I would. I still think the plagues are a tragedy. I still feel angry when I think of what the Bund has done to innocent people everywhere.

I still think baby animals are cute.

So I am not dead on the inside just yet. And it could be that this is all a side effect of whatever the implants are doing to keep the pain at bay and that once I am healthy enough, I will be back to my usual passionately moral self.

But I know who I am and what I am capable of. I know what in me let me become the monster everyone knows and it was far more than ruthlessness and greed.

And it’s not just genius and creativity and resourcefulness either.

I know that I have that special spirit that drives people to greatness and just what kind of damage an amoral version of myself could do without compassion to restrain it.

And I know what I have to do if that should be the case.

I think about how ironic it would be if I were to survive all I have survived only to end up having to kill myself.

And it makes me smile.

---

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here I am, alive for another stupid fucking day.

Spent all day playing video games or sleeping, like usual. God damn there has to be something better than this.

And there is. I know it. There is a whole huge wonderful world out there, just outside the bars of my cell. I can see it so well from here. And I see so much of it from my lonely garret on the mountainside.

I know the people down there better than they know themselves and know things about their world and how it works they couldn’t even reach by guessing.

Fat lot of good it does me. I am like someone who is an expert in a very obscure fandom, only less relatable.

Because just what kind of a critter am I, anyhow?

Others ask who they are. I ask what I am. The questions seem similar but are actually worlds apart. Most people do not question their essential humanity.

But my connection with my fellow humans has always been tenuous at best. When that bastard raped me when I was four years old, he almost killed my ability to connect with others entirely as I retreated far too deep within my little mind for any of the sunshine of positive human interaction to reach.

And that’s pretty goddamned tragic.

And it turned me into this hyper-intelligent hyper-intellectual who wants to be human like all the other boys but he is fundamentally a robot and nothing is going to change that.

Repair may not be possible. Some of the systems that got damaged that horrible day may never ever come back online no matter how important they are or how badly they are missed or how hard life is without them,

It didn’t take away my ability to feel. Just my ability to be happy or to feel the warmth of other human beings in my mind

You know… little things like that.

And the thing is, I know I am not normal. I know it deep, so deep that it is hard for me to imagine being any other way.

All those times in my life when people have clearly been looking for a specific response from me then ended up confused and disappointed when I didn’t supply it (not for lack of trying) taught me that.

Whatever my fundamental emotional reactions are, they rarely coincide with the typical. I am an atypical person on pretty much every level.

All I share with most of the rest of the human race is 99,9 percent of my DNA and the ability to metabolize chocolate.

And yet, I am not just a robot, I’m an android. In most ways I seem like one of them, at least from afar. That only makes it all the more horrifying to them when I get close and send such unusual and disturbing signals.

I am a long time resident of the Uncanny Valley, The people who khnow and love me have found a way to make peace with that. Either they are Uncanny themselves, or they have found their own way to integrate all my conflicting signals into something like a picture of a real person.

I’d like a good long look at that picture. Would be nice to finally meet the guy.

And I know this is all crazy talk to the people outside my head (and that’s most of you). I seem as real as anyone else to them, and all my talk of wanting to be a real little boy so I can ginally grow up and join the human race must seem quite strange to them.

All I can say is that it makes perfect sense to me. Thank you for listening.

And the fact that it makes sense to me is further proof of what an odd little android I am. “Normal” (read : boring) people do not ask themselves what they are or talk about feeling like they are not real people.

After all, if I was real, I would feel my emotional reflected back at me by others and thus confirm my very existance.

But I don’t. Instead I try over and over again to make that connection and get some kind of idea of who I really am, only to have it crash and fail over and over and over again.

So eventually I just stopped trying. To hell with it. Human software and I are just not compatible. They are running a totally different OS.

Theirs is standard. Mine is custom. I have had to replace a lot of my broken wiring with whatever seemed to make sense at the time and as a result, I am quite strange.

I guess that’s part of what makes me a writer. I want to connect with people but the usual ways do not work for me, so I need a way to communicate that is intellectual and conscious enough for me to be able to use all these brains of mine to bodge together some kinds of interface.

It doesn’t work super good but it is all I got.

Part of the problem is that my self-isolating tendencies (fueled by social anxiety) make it very hard for me to put my words in front of audiences. To expose these words of mine to the world would be to reveal a very personal and intimate side of myself to strangers who might ruin the whole thing with their judgment and opinions.

So I suppose I write on this here blog for an audience that is 80 percent imaginary and ten percent freinds.

The other ten percent? Aliens.

They don’t think I am weird at all!

So what kind of critter am I? Confusing, I assume.

At least as Fruvous, I have a persona to hide behind. One I have perfected over the years so that it fits me extremely well and lets me get away from myself in a way that still lets me express myself.

Like I have said many times before, Fruvous is an idealized version of me. He is me without all my mental problems and thus he can express the gregariousness, charm, silliness, and vampy lust that lies locked behind the glass of my mental illness.

And I sometimes wonder what would happen if I couldn’t be him any more.

It might force me to develop real world social skills.

Then again, it might make me kill myself.

Better not rsik it,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had to haul my behind to the wound care place this morning.

Except that that’s not what it’s called, which confused the fuzz out of me. I looked all through the building directory and couldn’t find anything with the word “wound” in it. I started to worry that I was at the wrong “building across the street from the hospital”.

The place is called the Richmond Medical Sciences Centre. by the way. Next time I decide to get there via cab, I won’t have to tell the driver to drop me off at the hospital then cross the street.

Anyhow, so there I am confused after going through the building directory like ten times looking for the word “wound” ^[1], I saw a friendly sign pointing to something called something like Richmond Community Health, and so I went there to ask them where this wound care place was.

Turns out, they were it. Apparently I got my wires crossed about which words were part of the name of the thing because I was looking for the Richmond community wound care clinic and I was supposed to be looking for wound care at the Richmond community care clinic.

Whatever. I got there, on time at least.

Turns out, this was not the full admittance procedure. It was just the basics plus changing the dressing on my wound.

That was much appreciated because I had been wearing the same one since Tuesday and it was getting pretty gross.

The nurse also did a bunch of measurements, which I did not expect. They revealing that my legs don’t match.

There’s a 3 cm difference between my thighs (so to speak) and a 1 cm difference between my ankles.

I think that means the leg with the wound on it is still sort of puffy.

But what I noticed was that might right leg, without a wound, was a lot paler than the left.

WTF is up with that?

I swear, I will never take bilateral symmetry for granted again!

They gave me some stuff to read and I was on my way.

Bit of a pisser on the way home : after waiting a long ass time and watching two 401 buses and two 414s go by, when my 407 finally arrives, I get on, and the driver announces that the bus will be terminating at Brighouse Station.

The whole dang reason I take the 407 is that unlike the 401 and the 414, the 407 takes me to within one block of home. at Buswell.

If I wanted to walk all the way from the Skytrain station to home, I could have taken a 401 or a 414.

Sigh. Oh well, I survived. It’s only an extra block and a half.

So now I am home, and trying to relax. I got a whack of new game when I bought a bundle off of Fanatical, and surprisingly some of them were actually pretty good, so I have those to look forward to.

Maybe I will write reviews of them later.

---

Sure, what the hell. Quick impressions of some games.

Ash of Gods : Redemption.  A surprisingly good turn based strategy game. The plot really drew me in, which is not something one can normally say about TBS game. The system is pretty interesting, too. Lots of ways to make individual characters have their own moves and their own play style. Plus there are mods, which is always good. I plan on playing this one a bunch, even though I am currently stuck on a tough fight. Totally would recommend to other TBS game fans like myself.

Lust for Darkness. A 3D adventure/puzzle game with all the annoyances that genre brings. The kind of thing where you can’t just click on a door to open it – you have to click to grab the handle, then move backwards or forwards to open the door.

Because that’s how we all open and close doors and cabinets and drawers and things, right? Grab on with both hands and walk backwards?

The plot revolves around a man trying to find his wife, who appears to have been abducted by some fucked up sex cult/

This one is on the bubble for me. So far, the gameplay has been boring AF, consisting mostly of wandering around mundane environments searching for the one object that actually makes something happen.

However, the horror elements are well done enough and the plot is interesting enough that I am somewhat willing to play more…. for now.

Would not recommend, however.

Town of Light.  Super into this one. Also 3D and puzzle-ish like Lust for Darkness but with the annoyingness turned way down, and the artistic merit way up. It tells the story of a girl named Renee who was put in an asylum in 1920s Italy, and….

Do I really need to go on? You know if it takes place in an asylum in the 1920s. some pretty bad shit will have gone down.

Anyhow, she returns to that asylum six years after being released and explores the place to try to remember what happened there.

It’s very good. Great voice acting. spooky atmosphere, the occasional jump scare to keep you on your toes. And a plot that drew me in instantly and won’t let me go.

My only quibble is that sometimes the “things actually happening” bits are too far apart and I start to lose interest.

But still, would recommend for anyone who loves psychological horror in more than one meaning of the phrase.

Oh, and finally :

River City Ransom Underground. A highly surprising and faithful sequel to an obscure NES title that has built up a substantial cult following over the years.

This is the game I bought the whole bundle to get. It sounded hella fun and I just fell in love with the idea of people putting a whole shitload of time and energy into expanding this very old game.

This is the game that was worth $5.15 to me. The fact that some of the rest are good was a pleasant and highly welcome surprise.

I haven’t gotten very far in it yet. I can’t seem to beat the first real boss. But I am sure that once I get used to the controls, I will kick his ass.

One annoying thing : there is no in-game way to looks up what the controls are. It tells you to press P or K or S or B, but those are not the keys you press on the keyboard.

They are Punch, Kick, Special, and Block, and it’s up to you to figure out WTF.

The basic idea of the game is that it is a blend of the beat’m up genre (like Double Dragon, Final Fight, and Alliterative Alley) and an RPG.

So you fight like in a beat’m up. but you have a character sheet, stats, and an inventory like an RPG.

I enjoyed the heck out of the original. And I look forward to figuring out how to kick some ass in the sequel.

Well, those are the ones that survived the first culling of the ones I tried and did not consider to be worth playing.

Wow, I am participating in games journalism!

I am absolutely chock-a-block with excitement.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Eeep, no wait, don’t!

Today is Therapy Thursday, and I just got home from today’s session. And one of the subjects we got into was my inability to promote myself.

Tht’s my main achilles heel as a creator. I can make it. In fact between my novels, my videos, my short stories, and my blog, I have made an impressive amount of stuff.

But I never draw anyone’s attention to it. Ever. At all.

Heck, the only reason anyone reads this blog of mine is that I have some very good freinds who love me enough to read me.

So to all potential friends in the future : that is literally the best way to show me that you care. Read my blog, even though it is not written primarily to entertain, but to get out whatever words, emotions, and ideas I have floating around and free up some space in my head and in my heart.

As I was talking over this inability to self-promote with Doc Costin, it occurred to me that this was basically a manifestation of my social anxiety. To promote myself would be to draw attention to myself and leave myself open to rejection, and every socially anxious fibre of my being (and there’s a lot of them) screams that exposure means danger, attention means peril, and rejection means annihilation.

Dramatic but true.

So when I try to imagine myself entering any sort of forum or arena and shouting “This thing I made is fucking awesome!”, I just shrivel up like a mimosa leaf inside.

I quail at the very thought.

That’s a very serious roadblock. Whatever I do, if I want it to be anything other than merely an act of creative masturbation. I am going to have to, at some point. put it in front of people and draw attention to it.

I have heard of a lot of famous people who got ahead, at least in part. due to being shameless self-promoters who are all to happy to tell you how awesome they are.

Apparently, if you tell enough people how awesome you are, they eventually start to believe you. And I find that mindboggling.

My time applying for things on UpWork taught me that, much to my surprise, I can be extremely confident in my abilities and promote the hell out of myself that way.

So the problem really is just about promoting my work. And I see two solutions :

1. Build up a big wave of confidence in my work by reading the best stuff from it then ride that wave to Self Promotion Island, or…
2. Forget about promoting my works and just find appropriate venues for promoting my amazing, wizard-like skills

The second one seems more likely, even though it means looking for jobs, not venues. If i can promote myself on UpWork,, surely I can do the same for other creative type jobs I am totally sure I can do.

In theory, I could go back to UpWork, and I still might,. But I fucked things up so badly last time that I feel too ashamed to “show my face” there again.

Surely there are other places where I can angle for freelance gigs, or maybe even,. dare I dream it. ACTUAL EMPLOYMENT.

I know I can kick ass at pretty much any kind of creative work.

It’s just a matter of going out there to get it.

---

Negative Emotion Dump

Aw crap, it’s that time againj. Time to let my bad stuff out.

I fucking hate my tiny stupid pathetic life. My existence is meaningless and futile.

I might as well be a soupcon of snail shit at the bottom of the Mariana Trench for all the impact I have one the world. I would have more impact on society as compost.

At ;least then, the worms and bugs would get some use from me.

I just can’t stand this wretched existence any more. Nothing I do satisfies me. And all that dissastifaction builds in my mind until it feels like my head is going to pop like a zit and all my demons and devils and wretched sinners will spurt forth in a sickening wave of vomit and poisoned blood.

I am sick and tired of feeling like a tiger in too small a cage. I want to bust out and spray my unfiltered id all over the world.

My, we’re squishy tonight.

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. Somewhere in me is a raging inferno of anger, hate, and bitterness, and it’s going to torment me for as long as it takes for me to finally let it out.

Anjd to be frank, every day I get sicker of all its bullshit and the temptation to give in and set loose the whirlwind within grows.

I am tired of being the fire’s only fuel as well as the only one to suffer from its heat. I want to feed other people into my flames just to get a few moments rest from my eternal torment as the flames devour their flesh.

Instead of mine.

I get so frustrated. I have alll this energy, talent. intelligence, wit, charm, and sheer power locked up inside me because of a stupid mental illness I don’t deserve.

I did nothing to deserve being crazy. I’m crazy because of a lot of things done to me, and I didn’t deserve those either.

If the world was fair, I could reverse the universe and make the people who hurt me crazy, and take their sanity for my own.

I can’t even unleash my sexual energy most of the time. Alone, I have to fight the goddamned “sexual side effect” of my antidepressanjts/.

With another, I have to fight both that and a lot of bad wiring that got installed when I got raped and make me a stupefied, terrified, horny idiot.

Just once I would like to feel free and healthy and strong like a wild stallion on a distant plain who can just run and run and run for however long it takes to burn off that untamed energy and get himself a little peace and quiet.

Or just fuck the mares a bunch. Same idea.

But I have been caged all my life by the trauma done to me and the insanity it caused, and I am so fucking sick of it.

Something, somewhere has to give.

And God help us all when it does.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.