Been having a sleepy day.

And for the most part, I’ve not been fighting it, and I am proud of that.

I mean, sure, it sucks to sleep all day, and my feisty nature make me want to defy it and fight to stay awake so I can actually experience the day, but that doesn’t actually help at all. It just means I will stay sleepy longer.

So I have been pretty much just giving in to the urge to sleep today. Clearly, that ol’ sleep debt has come due, and I am ready to pay up.

In fact, this time right now, when I have to be awake to blog and eat, is the first extended time I am fightting the sleepies today.

They hadn’t arrived when I had lunch. Lunch seems to have been what set them off, actually. Maybe I finally got enough of some nutrient or something.

Biochemistry is so weird.

And it’s been decent sleep. Not wonderful, by any means,. but a lot better than the zombifying sleep I have been getting lately.

I have even gotten some sleep that made me feel better and not worse after!

Mirable diablu, that.

Kidding aside, I can feel a certain deadly pressure in my mind easing with each nap. SO the rewards are tangible. It’s just a matter of quieting the irrationally stubborn and cranky voice in my mind that demands I stay awake just out of spite and defiance.

So uh…. shut up, ya dumb voice! Choose your battles!

That ought to do it.

Read a little more of The Phoenix Guards by Steven Brust and I am still left scratching my head as I look for the comedy. Like before, I still sense comedic intent, but no comedic content at all.

As far as I can tell. the jokes aren’t there, man.

It makes me feel like there is some kind of cultural assumption underlying the enjoyment of this work. And whatever it assues, I don’t have it.

The easy answer is that it assumes you have read the Three Muskateers. But that doesn’t seem like enough of an explanation.

After all, there is plenty of comedy that satirizes something but is still funny if you haven’t experienced said thing.

So it must be something a lot deeper than that. Some fundamental bit of cultural context that makes the comedy work for people who aren’t me.

And that’s most of you.

I can tell it will take me a while to fully process the shock of Maelkoth telling me he thinks the whole thing is hilarious. The primary shock has faded, but the issue at hand will linger on until I either figure out a way to make peace with it, or I give up and put the issue back on the shelf until next time.

The thing to hold on to is that people still find me and my writting funny as hell.

So I still have a highly valuable skill to sell to the word once I get it together enough to be able to present myself to the world.

I’m getting there.

More after the break.

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Hmmm.Well that nap did NOT make me feel better.

In fact, I would really prefer to still be in bed as I am quite sleepy. Sleep seems good to me on a near-erotic level.

But I must blog.

And by the time I finish blogging, it will be time to go hang with J&J and watch Daily Show and Colbert. So I won’t been in bed again for a while.

Hopefully I will perk up before then, or the next three and a half hours are going to be rather unpleasant for me.

Well I can always ask J&J if we can delay the watching so I can nap.

But still This ain’t fun.

I wish I had a cabin in the woods I could go to with all healthy foods already purchased and stay there for as long as it takes to get healthy.

Or even better, a clinic I could check into for medically supervised weight loss.

I am not that worried about my weight per se. I have been fat all my life. To say I am used to it by now would be a vast understatement.

But I feel so ill on so many levels and I am very sick of it. I want to clean up my act so I can feel good for a change.

That would take a serious context change though, I think. My life as it is now makes it way too easy to just keep coasting along to an early grave.

Honestly, I could use a change of scenery for mental health reasons too. Spending so much time atg this computer, surrounded by the same four walls,. is not good for me.

No wonder I have a sense of unreality. I’m practically in solitary confinement.

But I don’t have the strength to make a break. I feel so weak and tired all the time. I get exhausted even trying to imagine my escape from this lame lil life of mine.

Plus, of course, it would mean leaving my friends behind. Not entirely behind, necessarily, but by a fair bit.

Might be worth it to feel alive and excited by life, though. Like I did when I graduated from VFS. All rip roaring to go out there and take on that world and make it give me what I deserve. god dammit.

I deserve so much more than what I am getting. I am an astoundingly talented individual and I could make an enormous contribution to the world if I could only escape the gravity well of my depression.

I can’t get out by myself. That’s clear.

But I have no idea who could help me get out. I am sure it must be possible. But I am drawing a blank, probably because of that selfsame depression.

Who would be willing to help me get a job and my own place?

Who would take on that responsibility?

Who would be willing to lend me that much strength?

“Nobody!” whispers my depression.

But what the fuck does it know?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling all crappy and sleepy and dizzy and such. The usual.

And I am out of antihistamines. These phenomena are not unrelated.

Because my antihistamines are also my sinus pills, and so I have been sneezing a lot (to the point of it making my tummy ache)[^[1] with nothing aiding the draining of my nose and sinus cavities.

So I have a had fulla snot, basically, and that interferes with my breathing when I sleep, and hence, I wake up feeling downright horrible.

Funny how these things work out like that.

So I must tell Joe I need more antihistamines, pronto.

The sneezing I can handle, although it’s a lot harder when I have been sneezing as hard as I have been lately.

Pollen count must be insaaaaaane.

Runny nose, ditto. It’s a serious pain but I can manage it if I must.

But day after day of waking up all squit-eyed and confused, with a pounding headache and feeling like I got run over by a cartoon steamroller in my sleep, really wears on the nerves after a while.

The fact that I could really use a real, actual shower ^[2] doesn’t help either.

I do what I can with a wet towel and soap, and that works for body odor management, but it is lousy at making me feel clean.

And I can tell my pores are getting clogged and I haaate that. It always means I am going to get heat stroke symptoms even in the winter.

In the summer, of course, it can be hell.

My diabetes ain’t doin’ so hot either. That’s because I didn’t get to do my usual Sunday shopping last week because the groceries stores were all closed when FRED ended due to the long weekend.

For the unemployed like me, long weekends are mostly an annoyance.

Because I didn’t get to do my usual Sunday shopping, I couldn’t get my low-carb snacks, and hence my diet has temporarily reverted to its previous, shitter state.

Really need to get that glucometer. Dammit.

It also meant that I have been without my beloved sugar free desserts for a week as well, and thus I am missing a chunk of what little joy I have in life,.

So, crappiness abounds.

On the other hand, I am going to get to meet Felicity’s new kitten, a little black kitty called Charcoal, tonight. And I am super looking forward to that.

Her family just picked him up from the local animal shelter yesterday, and initial reports indicate that he is adjusting well to his new home, and remains the adorable and affectionate little scamp they fell in love with at the shelter.

So yay for that.

Life has a way of compensating for the bad stuff sometimes.

More after the break.

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Feeling a lot better now. Still don’t feel wonderful but at least I feel like I am three dimensional and on my native planet, breathing its atmosphere now.

As you know, I have been feeling depressed lately. It’s weird how clearly I can feel the depression as a seperate, intact, defined thing.

A shadow lurking on the horizon… or is it a stain on my eye?
A ghost haunting my gravesite, just waiting for me to die
A dream unbroken, a nightmare without end
The curse of my life, but also my friend
My jailer, my keeper, my prisoner, my pet
A summation of all that I haven’t done yet
A seed left to rot, its bloom dead and gone
The afflication that makes it so hard to move on
The terror attempting to steal my last breath
The bane of my life, and quite likely,. my death.

Me, suffering an attack of poetry, just now

Well that was cool.

Sometimes shit just starts happening with me. I get the feeling I would be a much healthier and happier person if I let it happen more often.

For that, I would have to loosen all this rationalist discipline I carry around. :Learn to accept things without having to understand them. Stop constantly trying to figure everything out and try simply letting things flow along their natural routes,. one thing to the next, in this bizarre dimension I call my mind.

I get the feeling that a lot of my latent energy is tied up in knots by all this unnatural rationalism. My particular kind of (sorta) logic based mindset takes an extraordinary level of self-discipline and metaconscious oversight, and the fact that it leads to the objective truth of things seems like a poor compensation for the toll it takes.

And yet, it is very difficult to escape it on its own terms. Perhaps impossible. It’s entirely possible that I am trying to win a baseball game via chess moves, and real progress is going to require something much larger and more powerful than what I can generate with all my mental manipulations.

Some event with the emotional power to shatter my current tinker toy playground mindset and let something stronger and more complete arise to take its place.

Generally speaking, the things that can do that are bad. Personal disasters. shocking losses, getting fucked over by the random hand of fate, getting a horrible disease, having a brush with death, some unimaginable spiritual event…. the list goes on and on, and every entry is either extremely painful in some way or profoundly confusing.

You don’t escape your own personal hell by simply asking nicely. It takes a real sacrifice – something akin to gnawing off a limb – before you can be free.

And I want to be set free. Just point out the limb to me and I will start gnawing.

But it’s never that easy. It takes far more than one easily defined sacrifice.

And there is no getting out of it – it is going to take a hell of a lot of pain. All that deferred suffering has to be endured, and there’s so very much of it.

Might as well get started.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

PS, affirmations : I matter. I count. I am as good as anyone else. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I am amazing,. I am worthy. I am good.

And I deserve love.

That should do it for today.

Currently stuck in my head :

Today, I am wondering why I am in this constant state of existential crisis.

Here’s the con job : I hate myself and feel enormous amounts of guilt, shame, and self-loathing whenever I try to face the facts and deal with reality. In order to escape this relentless inner prosecution,. I retreat into video games and blogging and other things that distract, entertain, and comfort me.

Then it’s the turtle thing : my inability to deal with reality makes my reality worse and thus stimulates and justifies further retreat.

This is a closed system. Input from the world outside my head barely gets in it all.

And not much gets out, either.

It’s like a circuit with a relay that is held shut by the very powerful magnetism the circuit itself generates. The only way to stop it would be to cut the power to it, and the only way to cut the power to it would be to open the relay, but the only way the relay will open is if the power is cut, so….

You get the idea.

That image – of a circuit held closed by the power running through it so it just builds and builds – has been in my mind forever.

Feels good to get it out, quite frankly.

Of course, that metaphor is a vast oversimplification and makes things seem more hopeless – it doesn’t get more hopeless than “logically impossible” – than it really is.

But it gets the flavour of the phenomenon across.

My self-closing circuit can be attacked from many angles. For one thing, if I didn’t have so much surplus energy just hanging around in his head of mine, I might be able to calm down enough for the electromagnetic field to slacken enough for that god damned relay to simply fall open.

Or, I could somehow rewire the pathways that cause my energies to be constantly redirected internally instead of going out into the world where it belongs.

The classic way to fix a short circuit is to lengthen it, after all.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that this heavy internal bias towards where my energy goes is the root cause of a lot of my problems.

As is the intense magnetic field generated by all that energy just circulating around and around in an eternal loop.

I am beginning to think that said magnetic field is part of my defenses somehow. Like that’s the main barrier between me and the world, and if I was to finally calm the fuck down enough to really think, the field would drop and I would be exposed.

To which my inner prosecutor replies,

And since, my friend, you have revealed your deepest fear
I sentence you to be exposed before your peers
Tear down the Wall!

Pink floyd, the wall, the trial

Joke’s on that asshole, though, because I no longer give a fuck.

More after the break.

---

Had a bit of an unexpected blow tonight.

I was chatting with my good buddy and frequent headwarmer Maelkoth online, and I happened to mention the book I am reading, which is a novel callled “The Phoenix Guards” by Steven Brust.

I hate it.

Truly. The whole damned thing moves incredibly slowly because every page is overstuffed with atrocious dialogue clearly written by someone who think they are very, very clever and witty and could not be more wrong.

It’s like the whole thing was written by the most irritatingly pretentious person from your Dungeons and Dragons group.

The characters barely have personalities, the setting is both banal and overcomplicated, and the book seems to think that soldiers murdering one another in street fights over some imagined insult is all jolly good fun.

In short, I loathe the fucking thing, and if it wasn’t a gift from Luke I would have stopped reading it ages ago.

But as it IS a gift from Luke, I plow doggedly ahead.

So I tell all this to Maelkoth, expecting him to just shrug it off because surely he hasn’t ready this undoubtedly obscure and beknighted novel.

So imagine my shock when he said that not only had he read it, but he loves it and thinks the whole thing is delightfully hilarious.

The fuck? I was dimly aware that the author was, technically, trying to be witty, but in my estimation, it had not succeeded at all, ever.

So now I feel terribly isolated because it’s like I am suddenly in an alternate dimension were things just don’t make sense any more.

Patient readers know that this happened once before. That time, it was a dreary slog of a book called John Dies At The End, by Cracked.com write David Wong.

I bought it. I read it. I hated it. To me, it was just a long series of unpleasant things happening for very litle or no reason other than LOLRANDOM.

If all it took to be funny was randomness, static would be hilarious. So unpredictable!

But when I talked to Maelkoth about it, he said it was one of the funniest things he had ever read. I asked him what was funny about it, and he said “Um. everything?”.

And judging by the reviews on Amazon. 90 percent of humanity agrees. Sigh.

That time, I was able to sort of laugh it off and tell myself that I knew the day would come when I would not “get” the comedy of the day.

C’est la via, c’est la guerre, n’est-ce pas?

But this time, it is really hitting me hard. With John Dies At The End, I at least knew that it was a comedy book by a comedy writer and therefore meant to be funny.

But with The Phoenix Guards, as far as I knew, it was just a lameass fantasy novel. True, Luke had said that he liked its “understated sense of humor”, but I just figured it was so understated as to be nonexistent to a jaded comedy bitch like me.

But apparently, it’s hilarious to others. Go fig.

The whole thing was a terrible shock that left me feeling alienated and depressed. I know I will get over it but right now I feel pretty awful.

So if you don’t mind, I think I am going to go lay down in the dark now, and try to figure out how any of these pretentious bullshit could be considered funny.

Oh. Apparently it’s a sendup of Alexandre Dumas, of Three Muskateers fame.

Never read it. Don’t want to now.

Can I go back to the real world now, please?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Bought another bundle of games from Humble Bundle recently. It was an RPG based bundle. And I have tried all 6 of them now, so here are my quick reviews :

Cat Quest. A silly, cute Zelda-style ARPG (Action RPG) full of energy and charm and, of course, totes adorbs felines.

The plot is basically lifted straight from Skyrim: Oh no, the dragons have returned! Luckily, you have the Dragonblood, and therefore can defeat them. So it’s up to you to go around doing quests and getting strong enough to face them, and rescue your sister from the sinister white cat who abducted her at the beginning of the game.

Like any RPG, you have gear, weapons, spells. and all the other accoutrements of the genre. Originality is not the game’s strong suit.

Charm is! The art is cartoony, which matches the overal upbeat and silly mood of the game. The overall art style is a lot like Samaurai Pizza Cats, and while not quite as full goose wackadoodle as that show,. it has a similar sense of humour.

Verdict : I love it. Definitely a refreshing contrast to the gruim and dark games I usually play. I need more of this kind of silliness in my life.

Deep Sky Derelicts : Turn based strategy of the JRPG sort, with your people on one side of the screen and the baddies on the other, and picking various attacks from a menu, and so forth and so on.

The basic plot is…. complicated. More complicated than it needs to be, in my opinion. So let’s just say you’re the leader of a group of scavengers who explore derelict spaceships looking for salvage and lost technologies.

A bunch of plot stuff is happening as well, but you ghet the basic idea.

The art style is unpleasant, in my humble opinion. Everything looks grungy and diorty and is done in a depressingly limited palette of brown, black, and white.

The plot bores me. Obviously.

The fights are okay, I suppose. But I got sick of that style of combat a long time ago. And unlike other retro gaming elements, I have zero nostalgia for it. So….

Verdict : A hard meh. Would not recommend. Not my cuppa at all.

Immortal Planet : Another ARPG with another overladen plotline. This game, at least, has cleaner art and knows more than four colors.

But it otherwise made such a tiny impression on me that I had to look it up on Steam just to remember what it was all about.

It’s possible that if I didn’t have the bouncy and colorful Cat Quest to compare it to, it might have made more of an impression.

But as it stands, I can’t say I have much of an opinion of it at all. It seems perfectly fine and I am sure there are people who would love it, but I am not one of them.

Verdict : Medium meh. More of a shrug and “whatever” than anything else.

The other three after the break!

---

Arright, time for the other three.

Two I’m going to kind of review together : Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity.

I am reviewing them together because they are quite similar in the fundamentals, and so I felt like I had to choose one to play first and uninstall the other.

I tried Tyranny first. It’s an isometric RPG much like Neverwinter Nights and the Baldur’s Gate series. Combat is realtime but semi-automated. Classic stuff.

But wow, is it dark, at least at the beginning. It takes place in a fantasy world where the evil overlord had basically won, and you play as a soldier in one of his two competing armies.

I assume it gets better eventually, because holy fuck, um, NOPE.

I don’t do evil. Nuh uh. No way, compadre.

But I might have made my way through this moral nightmare if it hadn’t been for the other issue I had with the game, which is that the character creation process takes for freaking ever and a day.

And I was not ready for it all. It started out with the sorts of things I am used to, like picking gender, race, character class, stats, and so on.

But then it added things like where you were born and what your background is and what your previous job was, and I am wondering if this is a video game or am I applying for an office job?

I just want to play the game, not date its daughter.

I got through all that, and figured okay, now I get to play the game.

BUT NO. Turns out I am not even halfway through yet! Because before I can actually play the game, I have to deal with like at least 20 hypothetical scenarios based on what I theoretically did during the last time people rebelled against the Tyrant.

By the time I finished all that, I wanted nothing to do with the game any more. Too bleak, too complicated, and too damned presumptuous of my time.

So I set my sights on Pillars of Eternity,  which is the same sort of game but nowhere near as bleak or as complex.

At least, compared to Tyranny

It’s a lot like Neverwinter Nights, a game I was playing a lot until recently, but I have gotten pretty sick of it after having played through all the originally released content, including all three DLC packs.

So in theory, there is still a vast ocean of free content out there in its modding community for me to experience, but for now, I am done.

“Pillars” seems like a good next step.

Finally, there is Hiveswap Part 1.

It’s fantastic. I adore it. It’s done in the spirit of the old 90’s adventure games like Sam and Max and Maniac Mansion^[1], and it is just has crazy and funny and wild.

You play a teenaged girl with an always-absent explorer father she resents and a dorky brother. They are playing outside when suddenly. holy shit, ALIEN MONSTERS.

With a lot more teeth than eyes.

Because they don’t have eyes.

They run into the house, and after various hijinks, our protagonist ends up activated the weird machine her father keeps in the attic and whoosh, she swaps places with some alien lady on another planet.

After that, things get kinda weird.

I thoroughly enjoyed the heck out of this game. It’s funny, its wacky, it is jam-packed with top notch comedy writing, and its style and wit suit me to a T.

My one complaint is that it is too short. And that’s a great problem for a video game to have. I went into it knowing it was just Act 1 of a larger story, and yet, I had grown so attached to the characters and the narrative by the time I finished it that when those credits rolled, I felt like crying.

So bravo, game. Few things get me to invest like that.

Verdict : It will break your heart, and I heartily recommend it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh wait…. affirmations. Dammit.

I count, I matter, I am a good person and benefit to the world, I am awesome, I am amazing, I am adorable, and gosh darn it, people like me.

That more or less covers it.

It’s Therapy Thursday, I have my liter of Diet Coke and 7-11 samosas… time to blog.

One of the things we covered in therapy today is what an isolated childhood I had, and the phrase that popped into my mind was “emotional neglect”.

I had an emotionally neglected childhood.

There was nobody in my lirfe who considered by emotional wellbeing to be their responsibility. Nobody who made sure I got the emotional nutrients I needed in order to grow up healthy and strong. Nobody making sure I felt loved and valued and included.

Nobody took responsibility for me at all, for that matter.

Physically, I was covered. Food, water, shelter. Not a problem. But even that was provided as a kind of afterthought. Like they were already feeding and housing looking after three kids, so adding me as a fourth was within their very limited willingness to tolerate my existence.

After all, it didn’t involve paying direct attention to me at all. All it involved was not actively kicking me out.

They didn’t even have to make me feel welcome, let alone loved.

This, they could manage.

But anything more? Forget about it.

I wasn’t even supposed to BE there, after all.

Combine that with the social isolation and bullying at school and I was one very lonely, depressed, emotionally unstable kid.

This meant I received absolutely none of the positive social input I should have been getting. None. No friends, no family support, no peer group, no parenting, no guidance, no discipline,no reinforcement, and no personal connection to anyone anywhere at all.

It’s a wonder I didn’t end up some kind of twitchy paranoid sociopath.

In fact, in the face of all that,. it’s impressive that I turned out to be the sweetie I am.

A lot of people, especially males, in my situation end up going down a much darker path. And I have felt the call of that path many times.

But I don’t want to go there. It just makes things worse in the long run. No matter what, I want to stay as positive as I can and be as loving and cheerful and wonderful as I can.

That’s the life I choose and that’s the person I choose to be. I might be living in the dark but I am facing the sun and one day, I will live in the sunshine and leave the darkness behind me forever.

I reject the toxic comforts of misanthropy, cynicism, and jadedness, and embrace all the humanism, hope, and innocence that I can.

I know who I am and who I want to become. I know that I have so much love and kindness and cheer I have inside me, just waiting to be poured out into the world. I know that I can shine bright enough for all to see and be a star to guide and comfort to other dwellers in the dark.

And compared to that, darkness has absolutely nothing I want to offer me.

More after the break.

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Drops of Nothingness

Thats what my days (and by extension, my life) have been to me. For decades, I have felt like my life was a meaningless blank with no content and no progress and nothing to show for my time on Earth.

But my therapist challenged that today, and I am glad he did. He pointed out that I have written a ton, including short stories and skits, and that all this blogging of mine might not make me famous but it does stand as a testament to my perserverance and skill.

He actualy suggested I do a second, professional blog.

I am thinking about it.

Once he got me thinking about it ^[1], I also realized that the time I spend hanging with the fuzzies on Tapestries MUCK as Fruvous are not nothing. They count, they matter, just like I count and I matter.

Got to wedge those affirmations in there somewhere.

Plus, of course, there’s my friends – Joe, Julian, and Felicity. The time I spend socializing with them is not meaningless. It isn’t nothing. I contribute my company to the collective and they appreciate what I bring to the table.

So my life is not a waste of time or a meaningless void and I do not havre absolutely nothing to show for my time on Earth.

In fact, I contribute almost as much as a healthy employed person does.

If I had a paying job with co-workers, I would contribute as much as anybody.

That’s another thing that came up today – my long term goal of being an employed person with their own place and their own life, who can pay his own way and not be a burden to anyone, including the province.

Turns out that my therapist has been worried about this goal of mine for a while. He was rather vague as to why, but I assume that he thought I was setting myself up for failure and self-loathing if this dream did not come true.

I reassured him that this was an undefined, unlimited long term goal. No time limit, no desperate, unsatsifiable need. Just a goal – something to work towards.

I also told him that I would be working towards getting a hjob in my field, which gave him great relief for what I suspect are deeply bourgoisie reasons, judging by the horror in his voice at the idea that I was going to go work for “7-11, or someone like that. ”

Hey, I am just glad that someone thinks I am better than that.

Don’t tell him this, but were I healthier, I would totally work for 7-11. Or McD’s. Or any other low end McJob.

I’d be happy just to be earning a living at last. Paying my way. Having something productive to do with all my time.

Right now, there is no possibility of my entering the job market, even though I know I could many actual jobs.

But the job hunting process is an annihilation level nightmare for my social anxiety.

I will get there some day, though.

Self-sufficiency, here I come!

This is where things get complicated.

The thing is, when I try to hold the thought of my own glowing amazingness in my mind, I get this feeling like I am trying to stare into the heart of the sun.

In other words, it gives me a headache.

I think that is my main barrier (after depression) to really integrating my gifts into my self-image. If I really think about it, I am so gifted it’s scary.

I freely admit to be scared of my own power. In some ways,. I always have been.

But maybe that’s just an excuse. A trap I built for myself to excuse not folliwng my instinct to go out and conquer the world and make a life for myself.

And maybe my extremely strong sense of responsibility is part of that self-directed con job. Or at the very least, the attached worries about accidentally hurting people with the careless use of my powers.

Fuck that. I should just let loose and let the chips fall where they may.

So sayeth the id.

And yet, a big part of me resists that because then I would have to actually go out there and face that big mean world and that scares me more than anything else.

I have this inner adversary that keeps me in an eternal state of stalemate by playing whatever move is needed to negate any and all desires to do more.

It’s like I am a creature in a cage who has had to develop psychological defenses against thoughts of leaving that cage because it knows it is never getting out and thoughts of escape only serve to torment it.

And by this point, it’s scared to leave. The cage is its whole universe. What can possibly lie outside the universe? Only chaos and madness, right?

So maybe the creature spends a lot of time dreaming about what it would do if it got out. And these dreams are so nice that the creature can even fool itself into thinking that it wants to get out. Maybe it’s been telling itself it will get out some day for a very long time, and these thoughts give it comfort.

But only when they stay mere thoughts. Dreams to be used as a substitute for reality. When the creature starts to think about actually, truly getting out, it gets scared.

But its a nice idea.

And it keeps the creature in its cage.

Oh, and the creature has vast magical powers it never really uses.

Jesus fuck that is depressing. What the hell is wrong with me?

Oh well. Sometimes the darkness has to come out. And that means writing really depressing shit sometimes. It goes against my instinct to entertain people but it does me a hell of a lot of good in the long run.

But it also fills me with shame, like I just pooped in public. And in a sense, I did, in that I just voided some nasty stuff into the world.

My life is so goddamned complicated.

More after the break.

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I’ve been somewhat depressed lately.

The weird thing is, I felt it happen. I was chatting with Joe when I felt this coldness well up and engulf me like a clinging mist.

And my mood sank. Suddenly I felt despair and hopelessness and a terrible feeling of being completely and utterly alone.

And it seemed like Joe was a million miles of cold dead space away. I could still hear and understand him, but emotionally speaking, he had all but vanished.

As had the rest of the human race, to be honest.

This was the first time I have ever observed the onset of depression so clearly and consciously, and it’s both unnerving (the memory is not a good one) and fascinating (because Ifeel this might be very useful in my recovery).

Plus I’m an intellectualizing egghead, so fascination is one of my primary defense mechanisms when paired with intellectualization.

And so it goes.

i have been working my way through those emotions ever since. It’s like that moment when my heart was pierced by an icicle of wretched despair released a certain amount of the darkness inside me into my conscious mind and I have spent the last 24 hours plus clearing that toxin from my system.

And now it’s on the way out, and a soupcon of my mental burden goes with it. The ice melted a little, and I dealt with stuff I have suppressed for a long time, and now I can feel that it is on the way out.

And I am better off as a result.

Moreover, I feel like I understand what is going on in me better. That paralytic chill that is like the interstellar void made liquid. The feeling of it spreading through my body. Understanding where these feelings of hopelessness and isolation were coming from. or at least, where they began.

I would love to know what was actually happening in my bloodstream and brain at that moment in time.

And with this mental snapshot of the moment things went wrong comes a reinforcement of the idea that this whole thing is just chemical, something my body just does sometimes, and therefore it is not something I should take personally.

It’s nowhere near that simple or easy, of course, but it’s still a comforting though that helps reinforce the barrier between who I am and the disease I happen to have.

And I need all of that I can get.

Because I am worthy. I am wanted. I contribute. I have value. I matter. I count. I am by all measures an amazing beast with magical powers and that is enough for anyone to justify their existence in this world.

People want me around. They enjoy my company. They like me. Really like me. And I deserve their love and affection because I am a pretty wonderful dude to be around and it’s high time I give myself credit for that.

I am one extraordinary guy.

And I deserve to feel that way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got back from getting the dressing on my wound changed, and wow.

It is looking so much better now!

In fact, it’s barely even a wound any more, because there is almostmo apeture. There’s just a tiny little hole in the middle and other than that, it’s basically just a bump.

Obviously, this has me pretty stoked. It was healing to slowly for so long that I had just stopped thinkling about its progress, just in self-defense.

I can’t get all stressed out and tense about how long it is taking if I never enter the required information into my brain to try to predict it in the first place.

No plotting data points means no trend analysis. Or something like that.

So as far as I was concerned, I might not see the end of this thing till Xmas. So the fct that it might be gone in a week or so is very good news indeed.

Or if not gone, exactly, at least in a sub-medical state so I don’t have to keep going to the medical center twice a week.

It’s not a huge deal, but still.

So it seems like the compression stocking is working. Faboo. I am totally used to it being there now, to the point of feeling weird and naked when the nurse takes it off.

I mean, I am sure I will not miss it for long when this little medical misadventure is at an end, but as it stands now, it feels weird when it’s gone.

There is one thing I will miss, though….having someone touch me.

Having a nurse attend to me twice a week (and having it feel absurdly good) really threw a spotlight on just how starved for touch – or “skin hungry” as some people rather horrifyingly call it – I am. Apart from one or two hugs a day from Joe,. I am not touched, and I touch no one.

And the thing is, that’s not a minor problem. Human touch is deeply connected to our emotional security as well as our sense of connection with others, and without it, we go cold inside without understanding why.

No wonder I am so cuddly as Fruvous. I’m starving here!

And I am not the only one. Most people in modern society are in this state. especially if they are single. It’s such a profound need and most people either have no idea it even exists, or if they do, refuse to acknowledge it because they think it’s “for babies”.

Or, like me, they are fully aware of the need and accept it just fine, but honestly have no idea what to do about it.

I can’t afford massages and putting up a personal ad that says “Wanted : partner for extended mutal touching” is bound to lead to misunderstandings.

We would all be so much better off if we openly admitted we need to be touched and went about meeting that need just like we meet our needs for sex, entertainment, excitement, or any other of our non-physical emotional needs.

Hell, we are so confused on the issue that we confused the desire to touch and be touched with the desire for sex.

Sometimes all you need is a good long cuddle.

I wish we were all okay with that.

More after the break, including affirmations!

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I matter. I count. I am a good person. And I am not weak. I am powerful and strong. This mighty magnetic mind of mine makes me a potent wizard, with powers to do what others see as impossible, and to face what others fear and struggle mightily against, and defeat it with casual ease.

And I have nothing to be ashamed of.

Not my weight – it’s hard to lose weight when you are depressed. Besides, weight loss seems to be happening all by itself.

Maybe my body just got sick and tired of my obesity.

Not my lack of life progress – considering how sick I am, it’s amazing that I have made it this far. I am a real trooper. A survivor. No matter what, I keep going.

I’m like one of those amazing football players who keeps going with like five guys hanging off of him. Like William “The Refrigerator” Perry.

A hero for all us ginormous dudes.

I don’t have to feel guilty for the unfortunate aspects of my sexuality, including the one I can never talk about. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t want it. I can’t get rid of it. And it’s up to me whether or not I act on it.

And who knows, some day I might get the chance to act on it. But my moral standard for what would be an acceptable encounter are extremely high.

So unless I meet exactly the right kind of people – the kind of people I have no choice but to believe must be out there somewhere, living onthe downest of lows.

There has to be freedom and sanity somewhere, dammit.

And I don’t have to be ashamed of being somewhat of a hot mess that means well but is kind of lacking in competence and focus.

The competence is within me, but latent, because I am so sick with depression. I am positive that a healthier version of me would be highly competent, organized, and driven to conquer the world with words.

The focus might come, might not. It could be that I am tempermentally a dreamer and creative type and that works against being a highly focused person.

But I might find that once I have ambition, the focus comes naturally.

It could happen!

In short (ish). I am an amazing human being who shines warm sunshine and bright spotlights wherever I go and who has so much talent and intelligence that it can be seen from the surface of Mars.

Seriously. Somewhere on Mars, one Martian is motioning another over to his telescope and saying “Hey check out how amazing this fat human is!”.

Right back atcha guys! (Or girls….or um…. whatever y’all got over there…. )

I am an amazing guy,and I have nothing to be ashamed of.

Repeat until believed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s talk energy. The personal kind.

This hypercharged mind of mine has always produced enormous amounts of mental energy. I crackle with intelligence 24/7.

That must be what causes people who have only known me five minutes to say something like “You’re obviously extremely intelligent….”.

I mean, that doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s happened a bunch of times.

I have always lived in the center of the massive electrical generator that is this megavolt mind of mine, bathed in its radiation, and entirely used to having enormous reserves of mental power to call upon in whatever I do.

And to tell you the truth, that’s pretty awesome.

But it has a downside.

Living in all that radiation is not good for me. It has caused me to become somewhat of a mutant, and not one of the pretty kind that work for Charlex Xavier either.

More of the post-apocalyptic kind.

It’s made me a very weird little duckie indeed. I operate on an entirely different level from most people and it’s made it hella hard to connect with and relate to most average, everyday people.

But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that I have never in my life found a way to use all or most of that energy. I generate enough to power a small city but barely use enough to keep the lights on in a one bedroom apartment.

And when you produce so much more energy than you could ever use, that shit builds up and causes innumerable problems.

For one thing, random discharges happen all the time. They manifest as emotional instability, mood swings, paranoia. and of course, bouts of self-loathing.

That’s what happens when this shit discarges inwards instead of outwards.

And that’s very bad. I have known that this overcharge is the power core of my depression for a long time, but I honestly don’t know what to do about it.

It doesn’t help that so many things have been so easy for me. Acing tests that I didn’t even know were coming. Getting A’s on essays I didn’t even proofread. Just sat down and wrote the thing. Getting high praise for scripts I wrote the same way.

I can do these things preciselty because I have all this surplus mental energy. As a result, I have always been able get by – excel even – with minimal effort.

So those overcharged batteries of mine never experience any real drain. The surplus remains, with all its ill effects.

I have always (at least until now) worked harder than necessary. And due to my gifts, I have never had to work very hard at all.

On some level, I think I have been waiting for more to be asked of me for my whole life. As I progressed through the school system. there was always the hope that the next grade would be the one where things got difficult enough for me to keep my attention and make me focus.

But nope. Not even college did that. No pain, no strain, no drain. Minimal effort, maximum result, and I am not even trying very hard.

Ergo, it’s hard for me to even imagine what task would actually be the right fit for my raw power and abilities.

I think perhaps I may need to invent it myself.

---

Just wrote this on Facebook :

“Let me try speaking to these guys in Man Bro : Hey assholes! Get the fuck over yourselves, you whiny candyass bitches. Not everything is about you, get over it. Suck it up, buttercup : WOMEN ARE PEOPLE, and do not exist solely entirely to meet your needs any more than you exist entirely to meet theirs. Clean yourself up. put on clean clothes. and go meet women. Somewhere out there is the girl for you but you won’t ever meet her wallowing in a warm pool of your own butthurt wounded privilege on some incel message board. Get out there, meet women, and play the dating lottery until you come up a winner. Oh, and here’s the only “how to get women” advice worth a damn : treat them like people. They love that shit. “

Me, doing some much needed venting, today, September 1 2019

Upon rereading, I wish that I had not drifted into dating advice. That was not the point I set out to make. But patient readers know I rarely end up at my chosen destination.

It’s kind of like Doctor Who and the TARDIS. The Doctor rarely ends up where and when he intended, but always ends up some place he is needed.

In my case, I always end up expressing something I need to express. It’s just rare that I end up expressing the something I set out to express.

So it kind of balances out. Whatever I meant to express will probably eventually be expressed when I am trying to express something totally different.

It all comes full circle in the end.

The point I was trying to make was that a lot of these dudes honestly and sincerely need to stop whining about how women won’t fuck them when if they were to take a good look at their lives. they’ll see that the ladies aren’t even getting a chance.

You can’t win the lottery if you never buy a ticket, dudes.

Plus, it was meant to be an experiment in using the hyper-macho unreconstructed language of drill seargents and right wing talk show hosts as a force for good.

That would make for a nice change, n’est-ce pas?

Ditto for the heavily moralistic language the evangelical types love. One of the biggest mistakes liberals make is to avoid using the tools the forces of evil use out of some misguided idea of moral purity.

Fuck that. Do what they do….. but with the right message. Do what you know damned well works on their audience and to hell with what their pundits think.

We’re trying to save tghe world here. When your grandkids ask you why you didn’t do more to prevent the End Times, do you really want your answer to be, “Well I didn’t want to seem mean”?

Or worse, “I was too scared of the mean things the right wing would say about me”?

Give me a fucking break.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Of course, that’s only an approximation.

Did some calculating and realized I only have $354 to last me till the 25th. So either I overspent by a lot or this is an atypical five week month.

And there is no GST check to compensate this time. Next one is October.

I am pretty sure I didn’t radically overspend. I didn’t spend any more than usual. I didn’t make any extra purchases or anything.

So it must be a five week month. Fuck.

The thing is, I tried to figure out if it was, indeed, the dreaded Month Of Five last week and I thought I had figured out that it was not.

But the numbers don’t lie.

At least, not to me.

I need a more reliable way to figure out which months are the evil of having to survive for 25 percent longer on the same money.

Right now, I try to figure it out via the Windows calendar and, well, manually counting weeks. Which sounds simple enough, but it’s obviously too tricky for me.

I get so confused by the transition between months.

So that’s obviosuly no good.

Ah, this site has my back.

The first site that I tried after I Googled “how many weeks are there between August 21 ^[1] and September 25 ^[2] ” made the extraordinary assumption that you were looking for a date in the future.

What the heck were they thinking? Boggles the mind. Why limit it like that?

The one I linked to above doesn’t even assume the dates are in this era. As in, it had a AD/BC selector. These are my kind of people.

Too bad the web design is so crude. But it’s results that matter.

And yes, according to it, there are exactly five weeks between those two dates. Dammit.

Let’s test next month. September 25 to October 23.

Four weeks. Phew! Plus a GST check, which will be nice.

As usual, I am not in any financial danger. I have savings. I’ll be fine. It’s the shock of it and the feeling that I have fucked myself over by not seeing this shit coming that bothers me and makes me feel insecure.

I am perfectly capable of rationally and sensibly managing my finances in a prudent and forward-thinking way…. if I have the right information.

Oh well. I have bookmarked that lovely little calendar calculator and in the future I will make a habit of using it to check the upcoming month every time I get my check.

Oh, and I know how I will compensate for my current situation. Tonight’s FRED dinner will go on my card and hence come from my card.

That, and some clever shopping tonight should make sure I have at least $100/week for the next three weeks starting Wednesday. That’s not much but I can make it work.

Luckily. stretching a dollar so far it violates the Geneva Connection is a talent of mine. And, worst case scenario, I can withdraw cash from the card to supplement.

So my savings will take a beating, but that’s what they are there for.

I will be back after the break to talk about pain.

---

The fear of pain, that is. Nociphobia. I have been thinking about it a lot lately. and so I thought I would put some of those thoughts to “paper” and see what crops up.

Refresher : I think the fear of pain limits people in deep and terrible ways. People ends up suffering terribly from easily fixable problems simply because they are incapable of choosing to endure a brief and temporary bit of pain.

Loads of involuntary pain rather than choosing a little pain. That makes no god damned sense no matrer how you slice it.

The absurd example I gave before was the pain of going from a dark room to a brightly lit room. In response to that pain, people close their eyes. But no matter how long they close their eyes, opening them will hurt a little.

There’s a lot of people in this world who choose to remain blind rather than endure that tiny bit of pain.

And the thing is, it starts off sensible : all living things seek pleasure and avoid pain.

But we are sentient beings, not paramecia. We can see that a little pain to avoid a lot of pain is worth it. And yet, so many people struggle to make that choice.

It is as if the comforts of modern society have somehow made us more primitive. Like I have said before, this inability to choose pain can only occur in the context of our modern lives, which we have made so comfortable and painless that there is nothing actually forcing us to choose pain.

We can avoid it. Sometimes to our own considerable detriment. We are never forced to learn to get over it and do what is in our long term best interest as we would have been in a less civilized era.

On the surface, it seems like a ridiculous thing to cause so much suffering. A relationship falls apart because neither party will endure the awkwardness and discomfort of talking openly about their innermost feelings. A man watches his health get worse and worse because he hates going to the doctor and refuses to go. A child endures bullying rather than face something far scarier : potential disapproval.

Those aren’t the greatest examples but you get the idea.

The whole “lean in” movement touches on this. What if our reaction to suffering is making the suffering worse? What if instead of freezing up when we feel pain and thus keeping ourselves in the painful zone for a long time, we “lean in” to the pain and get it all over with?

There has to be a way for us to learn how to override our instincts in our own best interests. I am not sure how that would work though.

Teach self-discipline in school? How?

I will continue to contemplate this thorny issue.

But I won’t touch the thorns, because ow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

By a lot.

Sure I had a totally rad idea for tonight’s blog entry earlier today. But it’s gone, gone, gone. The river of time has flowed onward since then and the little raft which I semi-pilot on it has traveled a million miles since then.

A sensible person would write these things down, but of course, I am not a sensible person. I try to be, but there is only so far common sense can go to conquer my wild and elusive muse and past that point, I do what it wants, not the other way around.

So as patient readers know, I can’t do the sensible thing of writing down my amazing ideas when I have them, becase if I do, I will lose all impetus to actually follow through and write the thing, and in fact, before long, I will begin to loathe and resent it.

I have to write from the moment, out of inspiration, and inspiration, alas, cannot be bottled up and saved for later.

Not for me, anyhow.

I sometimes feel like I got the wrong muse, truth be told. Before I ever tried to be an actual writer, I would have guessed that I would be the sort of writer who plans out everything and then meticulously executes that plan.

After all, that fit with what I knew about myself back then.

But nope. Not a chance. I just can’t operate like that. If I was to make said plan I would immediately lose all desire to actually write the thing, and it would, in fact, become odious to the extreme to me.

Like, used underwear level odious.

I guess we don’t always turn out to be the people we want to be, do we? Instead, we take our best guess and figure shit out from there.

Nobody gets to decide who they are. They only get to discover it. This simple truth has enormous implications for the way we evaluate and judge people.

We judge people’s character as if they had a say in it. As if they decided to be obnoxious or boring or impatient. As if before we are born, there’s a character generation screen where we pick absolutely everything about ourselves, and it is therefore acceptable to judge said choices.

But we didn’t have a choice. We were born with whatever basic temperament we get and can do precious little to alter it.

A shy person can’t become a bold person – only boldER. An impatient person can’t become a patient person – only learn to be more patient. Someone who loves math and hated English class can’t transform themselves into someone who loves English class and hates math.

All we can do to correct our character flaws is move ourselves closer to what we want. And give ourselves time to change, and be realistic about how far we can go.

I will never be the super well organized hyper competent person I wish I was. That’s just not in the cards for me. I can become more organized and more competent, but I will always be a sloppy fuckup to some degree.

Luckily, I have other good qualities that make up for it.

For one thing, I’m cute.

Getting back to judgment, we can now see that judging someone by their character is problematic at best because arguably, they didn’t have any choice in that.

We can only judge people by their behaviour because that, they choose.

It’s true that character is the source of behaviour, but there’s a little thing called free will that happens in between.

Otherwise, our modern idea of morality would make no sense whatsoever.

---

I am getting really tired of hearing people talk smack about capitalism.

The problems in the world today do not stem from our economic system. They stem from governments spectacularly failing at maintaining law and order in the face of monetary temptations, and while that does involve money, it does not defline capitalism.

If a corporation bribes a legislator to loosen environmental regulations, that’s not capitalism. That is corruption, and all economic system have that.

One of the strongest parts of the con job the evil fucking bastards wrecking the planet and dooming us all use to shield themselves from accountability has been convincing us to use their definition of capitalism, which is basically “this exact system we have now and everything in it”.

Once we have swallowed that, it’s not hard to convince people that any substantial change would be anti-capitalist.

But that’s bullshit. Capitalism is what we we the people say it is. It is our game and our rules and we can goddamned well change the rules if it seems like things are not working out in our favour.

And if that deprives powerful people of the money they never should have had in the first place, I am extraordinarily okay with that.

Capitalism can be as powerful a force for good as it can be for evil. but not if us liberal intellectual types with the right ideas go around saying “I hate capitalism!”.

Nothing could empower evil more efficiently than that. It makes your rhetorical position extremely easy to destroy and that, in turn, destroys popular support.

What is needed is liberals who wholeheartedly and publically embrace capitalism and use its power to destroy the people intent on destroying us.

Make a profitable product. Use those profits to expand the business. Franchise out. Start a business empire to rival Amazon’s. Use your money to influence legislators to make the right decisions for a change.

Lather, rinse, repeat until you save the fucking world.

Elon Musk gets it. He knows that products change the world far more than people do, and that change takes power, and in today’s world, that means money.

As long as the people with the right ideas continue to turn their nose up at capitalism and refuse to soil their hands by pursuing profit, change will never come.

But if the side of the angels embraces profit and power,. there is no limit to what we could do with this crazy world of ours.

We could make this world a paradise.

But only if we stop hating capitalism and start making it work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.