Been super sleepy today. I have slept most of the day and it’s around 6:30 pm right now and I am still sleepy.

As in, I was in danger of nodding off at my desk and becoming a QWERTY head not five minutes ago. Started to drift off, caught myself, then decided that the time to blog and eat supper was right now.

It was that or go back to bed and end up sleeping for Lord knows how long. Probably wake up at 8:30 incredibly hungry (having mkissed supper) and highly disoriented by the fact that I went to sleep during the day and woke up at night – that always throws me for a loop.

It’s the opposite of it should work, says basic human instincts. Even as a night owl, i recognize this fundamental truth and strive to always be asleep before sunrise, abnd if i miss that, before sunrise is over.

Easier some times of the year than others, obviously.

---

I have been getting away with barely trying at all for my whole life.

It started in elementary school. I showed up already knowing how to read at a grade 4 level and knowing the basics of addition and subtraction.

I knew what they were and how to do them in singles digits, at least.

Everything else I picked up effortlessly and easily. Most of the time spent in class, I was bored out of my gourd. The school work was ludicrously easy for me, and so I never had to try very hard at all and still got great grades.

That’s not fair, you say to yourself. I understand.

And the thing is, that has never changed. At no time did life give me a swift kick in the ass and force me to start taking things seriously.

I think on some level I kept expecting that to happen as I progressed through life. At some point, challenge would exceed ability and then I would hit a brick wall, my coasting days would be over, and I would have to buckle down and get serious.

But nope. Not yet, anyway. All my life I have gotten away with things not studying ever and submitting first drafts as my final work and doing homework while in other classes and the short sharp shock never came for me.

Even at VFS, I was not taxed. There was never a second draft. I did the assignments with my usual casual flare and yet my work was better than most of my fellow students’. Even near the end, when the workload was intense, I barely felt the strain.

I am forced to conclude that I am a man of extraordinary abilities that verge ever so slightly onto the superhuman. I have never met another human being who could get away with what I do.

Patient readers know that I say this not to brag but as a way of trying to figure out my life. I’ve always known I was very bright, but now I see that there is more to it than that.

Quite simply, I can do more than others. That means I am extraordinarily capable. I couid do one hell of a lot if my depression and other barriers weren’t in the way and I found the right kind of position for myself.

But as is, I lack the wherewithal to go find that position on my own. My tragic flaw is that I am not self-motivating. Left to my own devices, I do nothing at all.

Imagine what I could do if my limitations weren’t there.

Now imagine that they just disappeared.

What now, big guy?

More after the break.

---

We are the rich. We are the poor.

Say you are middle class. Middle class income, middle class lifestyle, middle class upbring, and so on.

Imagine that you are watching the news and you learn about some billionaire who has gone viral for talking about her battles with depression.

“Oh no, I’m incredibly rich and it’s making me sad!” you say to yourself. Big frigging deal. She’s never struggled to make a mortgage payment or changed a dirty diaper. She’s never had to stand there and take it when some twit of a middle management type berates her for her poor performance on a job the twit couldn’t do in a million years because he’s too fucking stupid. She’s never had to take her life in her hands twice a day for a brutal commute. She’s never stared at a pile of bills wondering how in the hell she is going to pay them,

“Like she had anything to be depressed about. ” you say out loud.

Your three times a week gardner hears this through an open window and leans in for a moment to say “You’re one to talk. ”

He walks away thinking, what the hell could he have to be depressed about? He’s never lived paycheck to paycheck. He’s never wondered if the kids would get to eat tomorrow. He’s never had to sit there and take it while some social worker berates him about work she couldn’t do in a million years because she’s too fucking weak. He’s never had to go to relative to borrow money they know you probably won’t ever be able to pay back just to make sure your family doesn’t get evicted. He’s never had to take out a payday loan.

It doesn’t feel good to imagine thinking that about you, does it?

Imagine how the Lady Billionaire would feel if she heard what you said about her.

The truth is that there’s a flaw in the human mind that makes it hard to sympathize with those above you in the social status hierarchy.

No matter where we sit in terms of income, we somehow manage to imagine that those above us have no problems worthy of sympathy, and think nothing of our callousness.

Even if one of the things we hate about them is their lack of compassion for others.

And on some deep level, we know that’s how the people below us in class feel about us, and that makes us unsympathetic about them in return.

After all, if they don’t give a shit about us and our problems, why care about them? They should just shut up and be glad to have what they have.

And that’s the exact way that twit at work feels about you.

The truth is that social status, like a lot of the ways we divide ourselves, is an illusion. At the end of the day, we’re all just bits of carbon suffering through life and trying to find the door to happiness. We all have problems that are just as big to us as anyone else’s, and we stumble in the dark as we struggle to make it through every day, and everyone – including the billlionaires – have problems money cannnot solve.

The only solution is to remember that we are all human and we all deserve love, sympathy, kindness, understanding, affection, and someone who understands us.

Even the billionaires. The best thing for the world today would be people willing to treat the ultra rich with kindness and compassion, and convince them that not everyone hates and resents them and has no sympathy for any of their pain. Show them that there is a reason to stay connected with their humanity, and that equality can be just as liberating for them as for anyone else, and that nobody expects them to solve all the world’s problems – just to do what they can, just like everyone else.

Break down the walls between us, and there is nothing we can’t do when the people realize they are one.

We could make this world a paradise if only we could work together.

Believe it and make it true, everybody.

Because it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Shaggy old grey dog of mixed heritage. Friendly, intelligent, and affectionate. Maybe a bit over the hill but still has plenty of the puppy left in him. Great with kids – they adore him and he loves them. Makes excellent companion as he is loyal. friendly, affectionate, and highly adaptable to whatever your routine might be. The product of a home where he was chained up and neglected for a very long time, it has taken him a while to recover from that experience, but now he’s eager to be your family’s best friend, your kids’ loyal and gentle nanny, and everybody’s fuzzy old cuddle buddy. Do you and your family a favour and take this lovable old mutt home today.

SPOILER ALERT : The dog is me.

Patient readers will recognize that old metaphor of me as a friendly but severely neglected dog who was loved when he was a cute puppy but then he became a grown up down and everyone stopped paying attention to him and pointedly ignored him except when they very grugingly and reluctant give him the bare minimum of care.

It really fits me and how I feel about my life. Except I suppose I should add a bit where the family never planned to get the dog in the first place but got stuck with him.

Doesn’t really fit into the whole classified ad thing though.

I picture it (me) as a great big shaggy mutt like those dogs with the hair that looks like it covers their eyes.

Shepherd something? Something shepherd?

And the truth is that the old pooch can be a chore to be around sometimes. He’s clumsy and doesn’t always watch where that ever-wagging fluffy tail of his is going. And well, sometimes the dog smell gets pretty bad. His previous owners didn’t take care of him very well, so he has a lot of health issues.

And he needs a lot of affection, and will do his best to charm it out of you with his silly antics and numerous tricks. This is wonderful at first but after a while it can get rather tiring, and you might wish for a dog who isn’t “on” all the time.

Don’t worry though. As long as you are gentle about it and don’t make it seem like a rejection, he will happily tone it down when asked.

He doesn’t mean to get on your nerves. He just wants to show you how much he loves you…;. all the time.

The truth is, he’s high maintainance. But totally worth it. You just have to take one look into those sparkling, soulful eyes and see that warm, waggy doggy grin, and you will forget all the little accidents and annoyances and fall in love with this big fluffy doggo and wonder how anyone could neglect and ignore this warm, wonderful, waggy, wacky, and totes adorbs dog for even a minute.

Are you ready to take him in and give him his forever home?

---

And the thing is, I am so damned lonely and sad that I really would give myself to the first person who gave me pets and cuddles and a nice place to live.

I know that this is, according to all dogma (ha!), bad. Dating advice says to never date out of desperation, to set your boundaries firmly. to make sure you know who you are and what you want out of life and what you will and will not do before you go out there and look for the lover you want, but don’t need.

Well saying that shit to me as I am right now would be the equivalent of telling a drowning man not to be so eager to be rescued by the first lifeguard that comes along because it’s okay to have standards and to be honest, you shouldn’t be so needy.

Most people (thankfully) do not have my kind of emotional problems and have no idea what it’s like to be 46 and alone having never been in a relationship in my life and only at this point in my life being able to even realize how pent up and lonely I am and how badly I want both sex and love.

Most people listen to their instincts and do what their emotions tell them to do at least some of the time, and those guide them towards that will fulfill their emotional needs, just the way hunger leads us to eat.

But my chilly ass has gone so far off the deep end into the icy embrace of intellectualism that I have ignored nearly everything my emotions have told me for a very long time.

I sometimes wonder if that is the price I pay for my hyperintelligence.

Recovery, therefore, requires that i dig these buried emotions up, wipre the dirt on them, and do my best to accept them, listen to them, and possibly even do what they say.

That’s the hard bit. Doing things.

It always comes back to that.

---

Wrote this earlier :

Skit idea : Open on a super tough guy bar. Super tough looking guy walks in. The patrons of the bar look up at him a moment, then go back to what they were doing. Our protagonist walks to the middle of the room, glares around at the other toughies in the bar, then in an uber butch voice says “Does anyone here have a Paxil? I take it for my… social anxiety. ” Idly strokes the handle of his gun while he says “Seems I get real nervous about people I don’t know. ” A short silence, then another super tough guy says “Would a Zoloft do? I take them for when I feel all…. sad and vulnerable.” Other tough guys grunt in sympathy.
And so forth and so on. I know I came up with more in the car with Felicity last night but it’s slipped my mind.
I think it could be freaking hilarious.

---

Yup. Proud of that one.

All in all, it’s been a creative day. I have been feeling very bright and creative lately and I am loving it. Ideas come to me so easily, and in such detail.

Now all I need is an audience!

It always comes back to that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, the NSFW adventures of a snow leopard.

I’ve been going through the archives of a webcomic I loved but then forgot about for a long time because it had ended.

It’s called Nivlek, and it’s the adventured of the eponymous snow leopard who is cute, brave, fluffy, eternally hungry and horny, and has the magic power to make it snow.

It is also marvelously full of fetishes. And better than that, it treats them with a casual ease that I find very life-affirming and cheerful.

The main ones are adult baby/diaper lover, feeding/fattening, and soft vore. From the 25th strip or so in,Nivlek is rarely seen without a big cloth diaper on, complete with safety pin, and characters quite frequently eat a whole lot and get very fat. Occasionally,. he also eats living creatures, like the little demons that seem to be everywhere on his version of the Himalayas, but they are all evil, so it’s no big.

The diaper bit is mostly just cute. He never “soils” his diaper, and it takes a while before he is even shown “wetting” it.

But that’s just a wet yellow patch at the front of the diaper. In fact, most of the strips aren’t in color, so for the most part, it’s not even yellow.

Oh, and people frequently change one another’s diapers (very non grossly),and I find that quite lovely and adorable.

I should warn those of sensitive dispositions, however, that while the comic starts off quite mild and time, it becomes more NSFW over time, and eventually becomes straight up pornographic, with the emphsis on graphic.

I, of course, have no problem with that. In fact, I adore it. I adore anything that is enthusiastically sex-positive in a happy, gentle, affectionate way, and Nivlek has that in spades. Even when the adventures get a little violent, it’s still done in such a fun, enthusiastic cartoony way that it doesn’t even seem like violence.

It’s just such a happy place to be!

In fact, the only other webcomic I can think of that compares to it is my all time favorite sexy furry webcomic, Kit and Kay Boodle.

It takes place in the idyllic community of Yiffburg, where everyone has sex anywhere, anyhow, and with whomever they like all the time. This is greatly aided by the Yiffberries that grow everywhere, which not only give you unlimited sexual stamina, but also act as a one hundred percent effective birth control pill/.

So yeah. It’s totally NSFW right from the start. Fair warning.

it’s mostly heterosexual, although that eventually changes to include one gay couple. And I suppose some might find its view of sexuality a little too open.

But I adore it just like I adore Nivlek. In fact, more so. Its take on sexuality is almost as uninhibited as mine, and if I ran the world, it would look a lot like Yiffburg.

Only more so. No, I am not going to explain that.

Hmmm. I should have known that once I got talking about these things, it would be hard for me to stop.

I will get around to the waiting room thing after the break. Probably.

---

Right. Waiting room.

I went into the community health center to get the bandage on my wound changed. No big deal, although the rain did make waiting for the bus kind of suck.

Hooray for bus shelters!

Anyhow, nobody told me that my appointment today was at 2:30 pm, not 2 pm, so I ended up having to wait.

No big deal there either though…..if i had known it was at 2:30 pm, I would have wound up doing the same thing.

The time Joe can drop me off doesn’t vary.

And during my wait, some gentlemen of no fixed address were having a conversation about their lives and I found it fascinating.

Seems this one guy had just vacated his current shelter, one called Stories, and left all his belongings behind with no plan to return from them because that shelter had, alas, descended into a nightmarish hellhole of booze, drugs, partying, and stabbings.

You read that right. Stabbings. Apparently, a person of their acquaintance had, for reasons unknown, stabbed another reside in the thigh, and said resident had reacted by grabbing the knife and stabbing his assailant back.

Fair enough, I suppose.

Our main speaker, let’s call him Beardie, did not explicitly list that incident as a reason for his rapid departure from that facility, but it was heavily implied.

What struck me is that despite the impulsive nature of his vacating of his lodgings, he definitely had it all figured out. He had a bed waiting for him at another shelter, and was going to stay with the friend he had accompanied to the health center until then.,

Poor fellow was in for cellulitis of the thighs. I caught a glimpse of it. Yikes. Poor guy!

And this was not Beardie’s week, because apparently the fellow who runs both a Friday night dinner and a Saturday morning breakfast he attends went mad with a very tiny amount of power and banned Beardie for both events.

His crime? Not cleaning off his plate, apparently. He had been given a giant sized serving of rice with his meal, and Berdie being diabetic, he hadn’t eaten it.

This apprently incensed the dickhead in charge and he was accused of “always” wasting food and Dickhead banned him for life.

Don’t worry, though. Berdie was smart enough to immediately go over Dickhead’s dickish head to a lady named Diane, who said she will take care of it.

Sadly, as anyone who has frequented Internet forums and/or usenet will tell you, some people will go nuts with any power you give them, even if it is just being a moderator on a fricking IRC channel, and when they are in a bad mood they will use that power to take it out on the users.

Unfortunately, these people have always been with us, and always will be. What it boils down to is that there is no sure way to know who is fit for authority and who is not before giving it to them.

Hopefully Dickhead will lose his position and someone better able to handle things will be put in his place.

So as a lifetime passive eavesdropper, i feel like I struck gold. There was so much life in what they were talking about, and from such an interesting perspective. I was absolutely riveted by their conversation.

I had to stifle the urge to contribute at least half a dozen times. That would have been extraordinarily inappropriate, to put it mildly.

So that’s my adventure for today. The actual bandage changing was routine.

One weird thing : in order to get weaned off these compression bandages, I am supposed to buy compression socks, and apparently I need to go see my GP for that because apparently, they are prescription socks.

Sounds fishy to me. Not to mention expensive, althugh if they are prescription, i suppose that means the province will pay for them.

It just seems weird to go to the doctor for socks.

I am thinking that when there is no more wound (and I am almost there, the remaining wound is the size of a dime), I will be tempted to just stop wearing the bandage.

But as tempting as that is, I know that vascular compression is something with which you do not fuck around. So no going cold turkey…. God knows what might happen if my veins and arteries experienced sudden decompression.

Aneurism? Embolism? Stroke? The bends? i shudder to think

So I guess i am going to have to be an adult and do the thing I don’t feel like doing in order to avoid a horrible death.

Man, being a grownup sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fru’s Greatest Hits Volume 2, for one.

Yes, we are back at this subject. The feeling that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing, without having the slightest idea what I am actually supposed to be doing.

Maybe it’s just the way my mind interprets my long-term background general anxiety level. I am anxious, therefore there must be some reason I am anxious, and the easiest and most basic answer is that I am not doing something I should be doing.

But outside of school, I have never known what I am supposed to be doing. It’s like my whole existence has been spent in life’s waiting room, and playing video games all the time is my version of leafing through the magazines.

I have always lacked direction. A lot of us dreamer types have that problem. That mystic realm inside us where we spend most of our time is great for the imagination.

The Doug Henning types in the 70’s got that right at least.

But it’s lousy for ambition, Why by ambitious when you always have your candy colored dreamland to retreat into? Why go out there into the real world to compete for what you want when you would rather stay peaceful and avoid conflict and make do with whatever you happen to find?

Why paddle when you can drift? Merely for the option to steer? Nah.

Easier just to drift through life, going nowhere, doing nothing, calm and serene and completely hating your goddamned stupid fucking life.

Because fuck the path of least resistance, man. It sucks. I want things. Real, actual things that will never drift into my life. The only way to get them is to wake up, get dressed, and go out into the world and do things.

And that’s where the bullet really hits the bone. (Ow. ) I can have all the big fanciful dreams I want. I can hatch brilliant ideas by the dozens. I can formulate big beautiful theories. I can have all the startlingly original insights in the world and develop my understanding of the world to century-spanning guru levels.

And none of it means a goddamn thing because I am afraid of reality. Reality, with all its physical, emotional, and social stimulation that overwhelms me. Reality, where actions have consequences and things can be scary or weird or uncomfortable because they are not products of my own mind and at any second, I might become too hot or tired or sleepy or anxious or even horny out of nowhere and there’s no predictability.

Quite frankly, I’ve never been a fan.

But that’s where all the stuff I want is to be found. A job, a man, my own place, being able to support myself, new vista to explore, and of course, SEX.

I am getting very tired of flying solo.

So I end up feeling like I am on the top floor of a burning building and the flames keep getting higher and higher and I know the only chance I have is to jump out my window and land in the net below but I am too scared to do it.

So I keep telling myself, I don’t absolutely have to do it now. I have time. It can wait.

But one day that won’t be true any more. My time is running out. The place is burning down and one day it will collapse out under me and I will die cursing myself for not doing much of anything with my life.

And I know this.

And yet I still can’t jump.

More after the break.

---

Let’s take another stab at the original point of this dang thing.

Without the feeling of not doing what I am supposed to be doing, my life stops making any sense. Sad but true.

I think part of the reason I haven’t been able to get past my reality aversion via this feeling like I am failing is that deep down, I know that if that feeling away, I would have to really face reality and the mind-shattering nightmare that is figuring out what to do.

The world is so big and there are so many possibilities. I feel crushed by the magnitude of choice. There is no way to solve that problem via reason.

For normal, healthy people, this problem is solved by desire. Drive. They have some idea of what they want out of life and that points then towards a destination.

Either that, or they just do what they think is expected of them. But that’s a whole other thing and I don’t wanna go there.

It pertains, however, because I never, in my life, had any idea what was expected of me. Nothing, basically. To have expectations of me, my family would have had to both give a shit what happened to me and paid attention to me for more than five seconds, and both of those are clearly ludicrous ideas, absurdly beyond the incredibly tiny budget of attention and care they allotted me.

Like i have said before, I wasn’t raised so much as allowed to stay, as long as i stayed out of the way and didn’t remind people of my existence.

From that angle, it totally makes sense that I have this feeling of not doing what I am supposed to be doing. On some level, I am still waiting for instructions.

Or a hint, even.

Back to desire : in order to go that route, I would have to get in touch with my emotions and drives and urges, and there is a hell of a lot of snow packed road between me and that distant destination.

Once more, it all comes back to my thawing the fuck out. Tapping into the volcanic substrate of my unexpressed id and using it to geothermally melt the glacier sitting smack dab right on my chest, over my heart.

Like I’m some kind of metaphysical Icelander.

But of course, it ain’t that easy. Nothing ever is.

Being me is like, really hard, y’all!

I wll talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling lazy today, so I figured it would be a good time to finally get around to launching my project where I go through the 406 videos (almost all made my yours truly) on my YouTybe account and posting the best of the lot here, along with, of course, my sparkling and entertaining commentary.

Before I get to that – wow, 406 videos. When you make one every day, they add up fast. And I just want to acknowledge that most people have not made 400 videos, or 400 of anything creative really, and that I should be proud of that accomplishment.

And I am. Sorta. Look, I’m working on it, okay?

And that’s not even all of them. I had more but they were on my previous YouTube account which got nuked for copyright violations plus me being an idiot and ignoring the many, many chances I had to take down the offending video and save the account.

Oh well, lesson learned. Now, on with the show!

First, me being silly with images!

Those were fun to make. I love riffing off things like that.

Although I could never figure out a way to present them that I found entirely satisfactory. Caption before the picture? Caption after? Caption during as subtitles?

That’s why I started doing the jokes via voiceover eventually. That had its problems too, but at least the timing felt right.

Jay Leno made it seem so easy! And all he had was pictures on cardboard.

SHOW was originally meant to be a show where I presented bits of fun video as a kind of host. But it did not take long for me to realize I was entirely surperfluous and it worked a lot better if I stayed out of the picture.

I’m glad that episode is still there. It’s my favorite. It turned out really well and it shows how I was really getting into the art of editing video at the time.

I find it highly satisfying. It’s kind of like composing and kind of like writing and kind of like painting a picture, but it’s really its own rich and marvelous art.

That stuff with the coach and the kids is a real sex ed video, by the way. I tired my best to put the clips in order of ascending pervertedness and blatancy of homosexuality.

It was a simpler and more innocent time, where you could make something like that knowing that nobody would call you out on it for fear of seeming like a pervert themselves for noticing.

That’s a real thigh-slappingly racist cartoon from the 60’s, too. Isn’t it strange how the products of a simpler and more innocent time can be some of the most horribly wrong stuff around at the same time?

Oh, and I swear I had no idea how homoerotic that “Capital I” song was until I saw it in the context of that video.

Rubbing it here, scrubbing it there..

More after the break.

---

I’d forgotten all about this. Yay, another compilation!

Tons of great stuff in there, including a bunch of clips from the episodes of my vlog that aren’t on my current YouTube account.

I am especially happy that it includes clips from my most patient and supportive reader, the always fabulous Felicity Walker.

Love you, dear. Love sharing you with the world.

“Remove all numerals except six. ” Numbers disappear slowly while dramatic music plays in the background. “666!”

That clip still blows my mind. It take real talent (of a sort) to come up with something that frontal cortex bogglingly stupid.

Well, it was either that, or some hack screenwriter would have had to do math, so clearly, that line was the only choice.

And yup, Ayd’s was a real product. I know the clip from the ad seems too good to be true, but the world is just that fucked up sometimes.

Ayd’s has nothing in it to make me nervous!

And then there’s Community Notes. That is still the thing I have made that came closest to coming out exactly how I wanted it.

Music is too loud relative to the voiceover though. Dammit.

Oh, and I wasn’t sure about that Zombie Clown Patrol bit, but people seemed to find it pretty funny anyway.

Damn I miss that shirt. It was so damn comfy.

And now one of the few things I have written that was actually produced.

It has MORE FELICITY WALKER!! Awesome.

Yes, I wrote that silly ass thing. Seems a tad simplistic and crude to me now, but then again, I wrote that 10+ years plus a VFS education ago.

For all the good THAT did me.

Fun fact : that voiceover was provided by my beloved roommate and life competence provider, Joseph Devoy.

And yeah, the acting is a tad unrefined, but what the heck, none of us are professionals, and this was something we put together just for the hell of it.

I did the editing too, of course. I edited all these videos. Just part of the service when you watch a video by my crazy self.

Interviewer : You write. You act. You edit. You compose music. Tell me, why did you decide to master all these disciplines?

Me : Because I’m a depressed loner with serious social issues and it was the only way to get things done without involving other people.

It often turns out that way. In modern society we admire people for their independence like it’s an admirable character trait when the reality might be they are severely psychologically maladjusted and thus did not have much of a choice about it.

You know. Kinda like me.

Actually, exactly like me.

Which is pretty sad. but at least I got loads of talent out of it.

Now it’s just a matter of becoming sane enough to make money with it.

And how hard can that be?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My marverlous roomie Julian just introduced me to an idea he picked up from a speaker he saw as part of the Vancouver Fringe Festival.

It’s called “positive catastrophizing”, and I like it.

Catastrophizing, for those who don’t know, is a process by which a depressed person’s mind conjures up terrible consequences for relatively trivial actions.

Example : “If I go to that party, I probably won’t know anyone, and I will just end up feeling alienated, and that will make me drink too much, and then I’ll probably mouth off to the wrong person, who will then stab me to death with a grapefruit spoon. “

Note the subtle intellectual dishonesty. That is actually a long string of dependent contingencies where if any of them fail to happen, the whole thing falls apart and the predicted terrible end does not occur.

But it is treated as if it’s a certainty. Hence all that use of the word “probably”.

This is one of the many ways the mind tries to make sense of the neurochemical state that is depression. It is a product of depression’s constant need for excuses to not do the sorts of the things the healthy portion of the mind wants to do but which prompt fear and aversion in the diseased portion of the mind.

It’s “sour grapes” writ large. It’s okay to stop trying to reach those grapes because they were probably sour anyhow, he said based on absolutely no evidence.

Depression thrives on these kinds of excuses : reasons not to try.

Positive catastrophizing turns that mechanism into a way to stop doing things you should not be doing in the first place.

The speaker was a former hard drugs abuser, and he described the positive part of his brain saying, “Hey, let’s do drugs!” and then the depressed part saying “Yeah, but if we do drugs, we’ll crash, and feel terrible, and end up doing things that land us in jail…”

Makes sense, right? Catastrophization (man that’s a long word to type) destroys motivation and thus behaviours, so why not unleash it on the self-destructive things we depressives do to self-medicate?

I’ve been struggling to apply this brilliant idea to my own situation, but it’s not easy because I don’t have self-destructive behaviours, I have self-destructive idleness.

I mean, I definitely have an addiction : video games. SO I suppose I can say to myself, “if you spend all day playing video games like usual, you won’t get anything productive done and you’ll hate yourself for that and you will end up in the exact same place ten years from now and REALLY hate yourself for that… ”

Hmmm. Judging by how hard that was to type and how upset I am right now, I think I may have struck paydirt.

I mean, face it : the one thing keeping me from getting anywhere in life is video games. The addiction consumes all my time and energy, leaving no space for doing something harder and scarier like looking for freelance work.

While I am playing video games, I’m not scared. I’m not depressed. I’m not anxious. I don’t feel lost or abandoned or isolated.

It’s the closest I get to feeling sane. And in the world of video games, I am not merely healthy, I am a kickass awesome hero righting wrongs and beating the ever loving shit out of the bad guys.

The only way I am ever going to escape this trap I am in is to cut back on my video game playing and the thought of doing that scares me.

A little voice in my head says “But without that…. what have I got?”.

A lot…. technically.

But the reality is not the same.

More on this later.

---

It’s the money, stupid

No wonder I have been so depressed lately.

My money situation is bad!

And the funny thing is that every time this happens – I end up depressed because of money stress – I go through the same process.

I blog about how horrible five week months are because they make me have to survive for five weeks on the same money that usually pays for four (so it’s like a 25 percent penalty) and passionately no employer would get away with this and so on etc.

Then I apparently complete forget that and mope about wondering why I am so darned depressed all the time.

It’s a simple formula – financial insecurity equals emotional insecurity.

I think I forget this over and over because I don’t want to face how little power over my own life I have. How vulnerable I am to the whims of fate.

And in general how much it sucks to be poor.

Because on regular four week months, if I play my cards right, I can kind of fake it. Pretend like I am normal adult human who can go out with friends and indulge in his favorite snacks with the same ease as any other modern consumer..

But it’s bullshit. I am constantly trying to stretch my budget and worrying over how to pay for my currrent lifestyle, sad though it might be.

I can never just relax, knowing I have things covered. That kind of security is for functional, tax-paying citizens.

Us tax burdens cannot afford the luxury of relaxation.

And I know this is not entirely outside my control. If I wanted more security, I could cut down my expenses. Bring my own food from home instead of buying McD’s when we go hang out at Felicity’s parents’ place. Not have sugar free dessert with EVERY meal. Eat before I go to the comedy night with Felicity and drink water. Cut out the Saturday night ordering in now and then.

All of those are sane, practical steps I could take to ease my stress.

And they all depress the hell out of me. I am addicted to this pretend-adult lifestyle and like all humans, to me a loss of lifestyle seems a little like someone dying.

Once we grow, it hurts to shrink. Some would rather die big than live small.

Of course, there is always the dread curse of employment. I could totally log back on to UpWork and scare myself up a freelance gig.

The fear I feel when I think about doing that is crazy. I am amazingly talented and I know how to sell myself to prospective employers with my creativity and enthusiasm. I have no doubt that it would not take long for me to find work.

And yet that seems so out of reach. Maybe because I want it to be. I dunno.

What I need is a daily routine, like with this blogging. A goal I can set for myself every day and stick to until it becomes habitual.

Imagine if I had something that was roughly the same amount of work as this blog, but that I actually get paid to do.

There is such a thing as a professional blogger. It IS possible to make a living at this.

One of these days, I am going to simply elbow my way to the podium and let the world know how I really feel.

And on that day, watch the fuck out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t know what it’s like to be close to another person.

I don’t think I have ever been truly close to anyone.

I know that sounds insane but I keep checking and rechecking in my head and I can’t think of anyone I was close to, emotionally speaking.

Maybe before the rape, back when I was a cheerful charmer full of warmth and wit and, of course, way too smart for my own good.

I know I was close to my mother and my babysitter Betty back then,.

But then the rape happened and steel doors slammed shut inside me and then I went to school, Betty went away forever, and I was thrown to the wolves at school, and my mother shut down emotionally and froze me out, and by grade 3 I was absolutely alone in the world.

No friends, no family, no mentors, no peers, no anything.

And that’s been it for all the decades that came after. I have never gotten any closer than being friends with someone since then.

And even my friendships have never been very close. I love my friends and I hope they love me, but it’s a very intellectual kind of friendship, without a klot of openly expressed emotions, vulnerability, or intimacy.

It’s about all I can handle.

My social damage runs so deep.

I have decades’ worht of frostbite from all that silence and isolation inside me. Decades of the harshest of winters into which I was abandoned and lacked the wherewithal to realize how miserable I was and then I should get the fuck out of there ASAP.

I am tragically short on survival and/or self-preservation instinct. Must be buried under all that snow and ice.

Along with my heart and all those places where love should have gone.

I wish I could stick a finger down my psychological throat to make myself vomit up all the dirty snow and soiled ice and toxic sludge that I have accumulated over the decades and finally purge myself of all this pain.

But it doesn’t work like that, at least, not for me. I am stable to a fault. No matter what, I just keep toddling forward like the Energizer bunny, never breaking down enitrely but never doing very well either, trapped in my own cage and unable to escape except by painfully and laboriously tunneling my way out via words.

It’s a frustratingly tedious process, but words are what I do, and words are all I have.

Sometimes it feels like words are all I am.

An so I void my pain onto the page, melting a glacier a bucketful at a time, with nobody to help because nobody can even enter my cold little world.

That’s the real closeness issue : nobody get close because I don’t let them in.

I can’t do it. I am too broken inside. The man who raped me when I was 4 years old cut me off from humanity with his evil fucking cock.

And I have dwelled the darkness ever since.

More after the break.

---

The Vampire’s Blog – Grandfather Safsata’s remarks

I have been asked (rather stridently, I might add) to address the perennial issue of whether or nope vampires have sex.

Apparently, according to a group of painfully earnest pre-centurians, as I am now the oldest vampire in Europe, I “owe it to the vampire community” to “speak with my centuries of authority” on this issue which is “tearing the vampire community apart”.

Such dramatic nonsense. This is a prime example of why I havd dreaded becominjg an Elder for centuries. I miss the days when I could haunt this castle in peace.

But if I must, I must.

The problem, as I see it, is that different factions are using different definitions for the same word. Quite typical, I am afraid.

So let me clarify :

If you cannot or do not seperate sex from lust, then vampires do not have sex because vampires do not experience lust. Lust is of the life force, even when homosexual, and therefore goes the way of hunger, thirst, and toilet needs when we join the shadows.

The only lust we have is for blood. Bloodlust, if you will. ^[1]

However, if you limit your definition to the sorts of sexual acts normally associated with the term and leave lust behind, we vampires can and do have sex.

Some of us, in fact, have quite a bit of it.

Myself, I go through phases.

You see, we may not have the lust but the pleasure remains. Even without desire, sex remains one of the most potent sources of pleasure available.

And we vampires treasure our pleasures. They get us through the centuries.

And we vamps have an unfair advantage over the living when it comes to adventures of the boudoir : the key parts of our anatomy are ours to command and we do not tire.

Oh, and we have eternity in which to hone our techniques.

There, that should give you prurient types something to think about.

The difference is that for us, it’s only pleasure. None of the emotions the living associate with sex are present. There is no sense of intimacy, connection, exultation, titilation, or fulfilment, sexual or otherwise.

Emotionally speaking, it’s like getting a good backrub.

It feels good, it makes us see our lover(s) in a favorable light as a source of that pleasure, and that’s about it.

So what it really boils down to is whether you find the idea of such detached eroticism so very appalling that you refuse to acknowledge it as sex at all.

Either that, or you have been indulging widely for so many years while telling yourself it wasn’t really sex that to change your mind now would be to admit that you are a ravenous sex fiend and have been for centuries.

For me, it’s simple. If it would be sex if the living were doing it, it’s sex for us too. Sure, there is a emotional difference, but the essence of the act itself is exactly the same.

Now I believe I have sufficiently dealt with this delicate subject to have earned my evening meal and subsequent torpor.

I hope it’s Lisette. She is delicious on every possible level.

Oh, and the next time you have questions concerning this subject, please ask someone else. Being this candid is exhausting for a man of my age and upbringing.

Until next time, may your nights be dark, your winds be swift, and your wings be strong.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

T

That’s a phrase that just popped into my head when I was trying to name my team of explorer/scavengers in a game of Deep Sky Derelicts.

And the phrase had such power in it (to me, anyhow) that I named my team that even though that’s not really a team name in the traditional sense of the word.

My first stab at figuring out what, exactly, I mean by that is that it refers to all the very private pain I have been through in my solitary and lonesome existence.

That covers the “forgotten” part neatly. But trials? Have I been tested? Am I still being tested to this day?

It’s definitely that sense of the word “trial”. The kind where someone or something is being tested for worthiness.

Not the legal sort of trial, although I certainly have been prosecuting the hell out of myself for long enough for it to qualify.

But no, this is the “test of strength” type trial. The sort of thing that the native tribe might put our studly hero through befoe accepting him into their tribe.

Because even in the days of radio, white people were still desperate for the approval of the same people they oppressed. Weird.

And as patient readers know, I have certainly felt forgotten for a long as I can remember. Forgotten and abandoned, like the crumbling ruins of an ancient temple to some god who died with its people.

Ever since that fateful first day of school, when I transitioned from being a kid with a full time babysitter whose whole job was to look after him to a kid who nobody paid much attention to and who was left to fend for himself in a way that had never been asked of him before then.

Hmmm. Some of that is new. Interesting.

Nobody had though, I suppose, to do anything to prepare me for that day. Nobody worried whether I would be lonely, or if I would have seperation anxiety, or if I would in any sense be okay.

Nobody even bothered to walk me there. I faced that first day completely alone.

And that’s just how my childhood worked from then on. I basically faced childhood alone. I lost all sense that anyone, anywhere was looking out for me. I was left to raise myself, more or less.

And there are no words to express how very very wrong that was.

I deserved so much better. I was a sweet,. bright, adorable kid and I deserved all the love and concern and fussing over that the other kids got.

But nobody ever really thought of me as their responsibility. I can see that clearly now. I was not someone anyone looked after.

I wan’t even a resented burden, because someone has to actually “pick you up” in order for you to be a burden on them. I wasn’t even that present in their minds.

The messages was clear : “Be grateful for whatever we remember to give you, and never, ever, ever dare to ask for anything. ”

And I deserved so much better. What happened to me back then was a terrible crime and I have every right to be mad about it and shout my rage to the skies.

Those fucking people. The ones who were supposed to love, cherish, nourish, and protect me but instead they barely tolerated me.

Fuck them all.

More after the break.

---

The Limits of Responsibility

OK, here we go.

Patient readers know that I have a rather all-encompassing view of responsibility

I think we are responsible for all reasonably foreseeable consequences of our actions.

And that definition has a certain appeal.

For one thing, it is logically complete. It covers all moral situations and all of the usual ways in which we think of personal responsibility. It is simple, fairly easy to understand, and has a pleasingly solid sound and feel to it.

In fact, it seems like the sort of thing that one might make a cornerstone of one’s ethics.

There’s just one problem with it.

It is utterly inhuman.

It does not take human frailty into account. It seems like it does because it has the word “reasonable’ in it, and thus avoids making people responsible for constantly monitoring all possible ramifications of every single action to the point of utter paralysis, and it also avoid making people responsible for consequences nobody could have foreseen.

But it does not fully take into account human limitations because it does not concede that even with those limitations, that definition might still result in far more responsibility than any human being could reasonably be expected to handle.

That’s where I come in. I feel like I have been carrying this inhuman moral burden for a very long time without knowing it, and that, in turn, plays a substantial role in my high background level of fear.

That’s why I think sane and healthy people have some kind of moral horizon that limits the scope of their ethical vision and therefore places a reasonable limit on how much they are taking on.

And I think that limitation comes, in part, from having a healthy childhood that inculcated a sense that the individual did not have to tackle everything alone, that there were people who would help them when needed and that therefore they did not have to worry about every little possible scenario.

The other problem with the above definition of responsibility is that it doesnt take individual intelligence into account either. I am hella smart and can therefore foresee a lot more consequences than the average person.

Does that mean my moral burden is proportionally larger too?

It sure feels that way.

All of that leads me to this : forgiveness. Mercy. I have held myself to inhumanly demanding and impossible to meet standards for far too long, without any room to forgive myself for merely being human.

I might have more going on that most people, but I am still a finite and absurd lump of organic goo trying to make sense of life in a universe too big and complicated for any of us naked beach monkeys to really understand.

The hubris of science and reason can easily convince a guy like me that I can conquer the world and all that is within in with my mighty, mighty mind.

But I can’t.

And it’s high timne I forgave myself for that and let myself just be myself.

Not an angel or a demon or a saviour or a paragon or a god.

Just lil ol me.

And that’s a fine, fine thing to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

An image and/or thought popped into my head yesterday and it seemed pretty important so I thought I would capture it here.

You know. For posteriority, which is like posterity, only in hindsight.

The image is of a structure made of human bone consisting of a main, thicker horizontal shaft with thinner shafts jutting out of it at right angles. Attached to one end of the main shaft is a human skull of the scary variety.

All of this is floating in a black void, presumably space.

And the skull is screaming.

It is screaming because this entire structure exists for one reason and one reason only – to radiate all my pain out into the void, like some kind of demonic heat sink.

It came to me as such a clear and specific image that I knew there had to be something to it, and the more I thought about it, the more I was sure I should examine it here.

The first thing to note is how totally frickin’ metal it is. Kickass.

The second thing that I think is relevant about it is how bare everything is. That’s what all the bone is about, I think. A skeleton is a naked thing, after all, and I think that’s the key here because in being so absolutely exposed to the world, this structure both expresses my own deep and terrible sense of exposure and vulnerability (naked in the Arctic tundra) and it maximizes the surface area available for radiating pain.

Just like the aforementioned heat sinks.

The next relevant feature. and I think this might top them all, is that it feels good.

This is not the torment it would appear to be. By being there and raw and vulnerable and horrible while screaming my pain into the void, it is actually makes me feel better.

It reminds me of that time when I had the image of barren world with nothing but big rocks and broken chunks of concrete everywhere and a constant rain of thin dark grey ash everywhere and that image actually making me happy.

Downright ecstatic. in fact.

What kind of mind is soothed by such a desolate picture?

And what the hell does the ash represent?

That image is still there in my mind but whatever emotion(s) it connected to are long gone. I remember how happy it made me, but as of now, it is utterly inert.

This bone thing, on the other hand, still connects with something deep.

Another thing : the whole thing is utterly silent. Even the skull’s screaming. makes no real sound. More like… a sense of sound without actually hearing anything.

I get the feeling that I would get a lot more out of this whole deal if I could hear the screams, and maybe even make out what it’s screaming about, but I am not there yet.

Feels good to put the image into words. I rarely get things out of my head and onto the page with such thoroughness and clarity.

Hope that’s a sign of things to come.

---

Pulling it out

Anyone know an easy way to increase font size in WordPress?

Anyhow, this is about something that was happening right before I got my food and started to blog tonight.

I was repeatedly trying and failing to beat this particularly pernicious boss ^[1] when I suddenly realized that the mere act of persisting at the task felt good to me.

It felt, in fact, like each attempt pulled some cramped up bit of energy from me and that felt good because it relieved mental tension.

And it was definitely a pulling sensation, as if the energy was string and each attempt pulled a bit more of that string out of the cramped cavity inside me where it had been hiding all balled and scrunched up.

This is not the first time I have experienced string-based imagery like that.

I wonder what THAT means?

Anyhow, the important part is that I was getting a psychological reward for mindlessly persisting at a task. No thought, no decision making, no careful evaluation of all the relevant variables, no cost/benefit analysis, just trying again and again and again like I was a freaking zombie.

This is not, to put it mildly, my usual modus operandi.

My usual method is to stop trying if I don’t see a way through. I either figure out how to solve the current problem or I stop trying.

And that’s not good. Sure, superficially, it seems logical, but that’s bullshit. It’s just a fancy excuse to give up if gratification isn’t already in sight, and that’s loser thinking.

And I am trying to rid myself of that.

So the prospect of gaining the hardcore persistence I have always lacked is rather exciting. If I can learn to just hammer away at things until I succeed, a lot of possibilities open up for me.

Like hacking away at getting freelance work till I get ahead.

Or grinding away at my bad health and bad habits.

Or persisting at online dating till I get me a man.

Or really, anything else in life that has failed the brutal effort-to-reward demands that depression puts on a person.

Not that I am going to put a lot of pressure on myself to make it happen again. We all know that shit never works.

Instead, I am just going to concentrate on remembering how good it felt to have that persistance tension pulled out of me a bit at a time.

Maybe I need to dial back on the constantly looking for the “smart” answer and trying to be mister smooth and clever who always “knows better”, and try to relax and just be another animal on this mudball called Earth.

It occurs to me that I have been using my mind as my primary defense against the world for a very long time, and it is stressing me out.

If I could just drop the act and trust in the world enough to feel safe without all that anticipating, evaluation, and mental masturbating, I could solve a lot of my problems.

It’s the only way I know how to live.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way I can live.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up feeling pretty crappy.

So what else is new?

I can’t wait till I get a new set of my usual antihistamines on Thursday. Right now, Iam using Joe’s, which are the same as mine except they don’t incluide a sinus med.

And it’s that sinus component that makes all the differtence, it would seem.

I am so damned sick and tired of being sick and tired all the goddamned time.

Right now, I feel like I could sleep for a year and still wake up tired.

Surely it is at least theoretically possible for me to actually catch up with the massive backlog of unprocessed medium term memories clogging up my head.

Honestly, I would just dump them all in an almighty purge into the river Lethe if I could. Just toss the lot of them and start over fresh.

Sure, I would forget a lot of stuff.

But it would all be stuff from my recent life, so fuck it, nothing interesting has happened to me lately anyhow.

It would be worth it in order to be able to think clearly for ones, and grab me some of that eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

I don’t know who I would be without all this junk lying around in my brain. It’s been there for as long as I can remember and I suspect that a lot of my congitive development has been influenced by the need to keep so much stored and suppressed all the time.

I mean, we’re not even going ot get into all the unprocessed emotion I have built up in this capacious noggin of mind.

Hmmm. I wonder if they are connected somehow. The memories remain unprocessed because I can’t process the emotions contained with them.

That seems highly plausible. I must ponder this further. I have a strong feeling that there is some important key to unlocking a lot of those memories in there somewhere.

Maybe that big ol’ purge is possible after all. Mighjt not be very fun while it happens but I would be ever so much better off afterwards.

This is getting very anal.

Well, if my feeling that I am oral-retentive is correct, then I never made it all the way through the anal stage of my development and therefore that is the stage I would have to complete in order to move on.

Given that I have been a slob for my whole life, with very little urge to clean and organize my life and my environment, the evidence for anal stage failure seems pretty damned solid, in my opinion.

I think being raped by a stranger at the age of 4 caused me to revert hard. Maybe without that, I would have turned out as a neater and more organized person.

I can feel the urges necessary within me. They just need to be unlocked. I definitely want my life to be more focused, organized, and directed. I just lack the wherewithal to make it that way.

More on this after the break.

---

OK, I am back. Now where were? Oh, me and cleanign etc.

I can definitely feel the desire for more organization and order in my life. And the desire for things to be neater and cleaner and nicer.

Oh, what I would give to live someplace where everything is nice and there is nothing around that makes me feel sad or dirty or just plain grossed out.

I just don’t have what it takes to make that happen on my own. Not yet. I can feel my “nesting” urges coming, but the angle of approach is, by necessity, extremely oblique, and that means it’s going go take a long ol time.

I wish I was capable of sudden, radical change, but I seem to lack the capacity for that kind of transformation. Perhaps I am simply too timid and dull for sudden radical change of any kind.

Dang my stubborn psychological stability!

I’ll not get into it tonight, but just in passing : that capacity for transformation is something that I might have gotten out of religion, specifically Catholicism.

Being French-Canadian. if I had been raised in a religion, that would have been it.

Catholcism is full of imagery and precedent for the sort of spiritual transformation I seek. I would have had access to that capacity from a young age.

But alas, I am stuck in painful reality with no spiritual being to consult for comfort and guidance and no transcendental realm of perfection to strive towards and hope for.

It is far too late for me to adopt a religion now. That shit has to be installed when you are very young, and don’t have your ego and skepticism up and running yet.

I see religions for the group illusions that they are. And I don’t fault them for that. There are worse things than being a little delusional, especially if it give you comfort and strength in your hour of need.

Seems smarter than being a depressed atheist naked and alone in a comfortless world with only his wits to protect him.

And granted, I have a lot of wits.

But it’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough.

There is only so much comfort one can get by wallowing in one’s own cleverness and feeling of superiority over those who have been “fooled”.

Well who’s the real fool – the religious person who has all they need to lead a healthy, happy, well-adjusted life, or the atheist starving amidst plenty with nothing to comfort them but the knowledge that they are “right”.

My answer is truer than yours, shouts the atheist.

Yeah but mine works, replies the believer.

How can you be HAPPY when you know you are WRONG? screams the atheist.

I am right enough for me and my happiness, replies the believer.

There are more important things than happiness! screams the atheist.

No, says the believer. there really isnt.

And then they walk away.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.