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.

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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.