That’s not an oxymoron, although it sure sounds like one.

Just got back from therapy. Yup, on Wednesday. Usually it’s Thursday, but my therapist had a dental appointment tomorrow at exactly our usual time.

No big deal. Knowing when my next appointment will be is far more important to me than having it always be on the same day.

I suppose I wouldn’t like it if it hopped around the days of the week like a flea with an itch, but the occasional variance is perfectly fine.

Today, we ended up talking about my crappy childhood. Specifically, the really bad years of elementary school, between the second half of Grade 1 and the beginning of Grade 5 with Mrs. Rogers.

Those were the years when I was totally socially isolated, I was bullied on the time on the playground, I had no friends, the teachers didn’t like me either, and life was basically a heady cocktail of boredom, terror, and neglect.

And it felt right to be talking about all that. In fact, it made me wonder why I hadn’t done more talking about it before.

So far, the only answer I have was that I had taken that whole time of my life and stuck it in one big folder called “The Bullying Years” and then filed it away.

So today, I opened that file and started going through it bit by bit. And I am glad I did, because a lot of awful stuff happened to me in that era, and I need to unpack with it and deal with it if I want to move forward.

And I do.

And this is rich territory for therapy’s main goal, which is to dig up buried memories so you can finish processing them and thus release them.

Repression’s basic form is that of a memory of something that was so painful that instead of dealing with it, the mind froze it in time and stored it away indefinitely.

Therapy, therefore, is the process of taking those memories out of cold storage and thawing them out so you can complete processing it.

Keep doing that, and that massive burden of frozen emotions gets lighter and less of your mental resources are devoted to carrying that shit around and keeping it frozen and that makes you feel better.

I’ve said all this before, haven’t I?

Point is, I feel like I got a lot of that done today and I am hopeful that things will continue in that vein next week too.

It all started when I realized, as I was talking to my therapist, that I was not making progress on a lot of issues because there was this fundamental damage in me that made my energies drain away when I tried to build them up to do things.

The only way to tackle something that deep is via traditional therapy. Dig it up and air it out. It’s the only way to heal.

It can be hard to grasp because it’s a nonspecific cure. You can’t say “do this and that specific thing will get better”. It doesn’t work that way.

You have to have faith that doing it will make you feel better in general.

And it does.

But it takes so damned long to do it.

More after the break.

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Back from doing that comedy thang at the ever-awesome Kingswood Pub.

Had the bangers n’ mash they do there. It’s pretty good because they have excellent gravy and quite good mashed potatoes and the sausages are okay.

The sausages are chorizo, and hence fairly peppery. As in black pepper. And that’s fine but I prefer my sausages more in the Italian style, like the stuff you get on pizza.

German sausage is a real crapshoot. Might be meaty heaven. Might be something that tastes like it’s actively trying to murder you.

Anyhow, it was quite the unique evening as the comedians had to compete with, get this, Game Seven of the World Fucking Series.

For the sports impaired, the World Series is a best out of seven games match. This means that if there even is a Game Seven, that means the two teams have won three games each and it will all be decided in Game Seven.

The team that wins that game wins the Series.

So for sports types, it’s kind of a big deal.

The show normally starts at 8 pm, but we decided to wait till Game Seven was over before doing the comedy thang. So even though it was just us diehards, we were there almost till 10 pm.

Fine by me. I mean, yeah, I still had this, the second half of my blogging to do, but I knew that was unlikely to take more than an hour at most.

I’ve been doing this since 2011. I’m pretty good at it by now.

---

Right now, The Melt has set in and I am getting quite tired. When I finish here, I will lay down for a nap.

Or an attempted nap, anyhow. With The Melt, it might lead to a nap, or it might be that as soon as my temperature stabilizes, The Melt ends and I am not sleepy any more.

So I have to play it by ear, more or less.

It can’t be too long a nap anyhow, as I will want to be awake for midnight so I can hang out with Joe and Julian and watch Colbert and Daily Show and probably David Spade too, unless one of us is super sleepy.

I like Lights Out With David Spade. His guests are all funny people and they get together and riff off of stuff from non-serious news.

So entertainment, human interest, funny YouTube videos, and so on.

And NO POLITICS. Even a year ago, I would have said that a discussion show without politics would be terribly dull, but now it’s a blessed relief.

Colbert and Trevor Noah handle the politics just fine.

David Spade gives me an oasis in the desert of the world’s madness,

And I really appreciate that.

Thanks, David Spade!

p. s. I still have a huge crush on you.

Thought you’d want to know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

But no matter how long the night, dawn comes anyway.

Hmmm. That needs work.

Sometimes, when I think about it, I feel spooked out by how silent my life is.

I don’t make a lot of noise in other people’s lives and they don’t make a lot of noise in mine. I know a ton of people via my alter ego Fruvous and I am very fond of many of them but I couldn’t say I have a real connection with them.

Just as real a connection as I can stand, I suppose. I am a very damaged person who does himself no favour by hiding it so well.

When I am Fruvous, I do a very good job of keeping all the bad and the pain and the toxicity hidden so I can be cute and cheerful and cuddly and funny and waggy.

And in a way, I kind of wish I didn’t have that option. Were I not such an adept shapeshifter, I would have no choice but to express how I feel to the world. There would be no filter to protect others, no mask to hide behind, no alternate versions of myself waiting in the shadows of my subconscious mind to be activate by circumstance.

I would just be who I am, and all my pain and suffering would show, and goodness knows, someone might actually care.

Or at least understand.

Instead, I languish in the doldrums of depression, unable to generate the momentum to extricate myself from my deadly predicament because I have gone where no breezes blow and any attempt to create my own wind is as futile as trying to make my little boat move by blowing on the sails.

I’m part of the same system. Something outside the system – outside myself – woul have to provide the energy to move.

And the very definition of the doldrums is “the place where no winds blow”, abnd so that is not going to happen either.

The only solution would be to paddle my little boat out of the doldrums and into the wider world where the great winds blow, but I am too scared that those winds will tear me apart and dash me to pieces on the rocks because my little craft can’t possibly hold together when subjected to that much force.

Why, in moments I would be out of control, and we all know that if you ever go out of control, you die.

If you’re lucky. Otherwise, you will get carried by the tide of history helplessly forward to an unknowable destination without any ability to steer around all those maritime hazards that life throws at me.

Surely I am better off doing nothing than doing that.

But then again, what if that’s not the most likely result? What if all that would really happen was that I would freak out a little at first, but then, as long as I hung on tight, I would eventually get used to it enough to grab the helm and steer?

What if that is what normal life is actually like?

What if that’s what my life could actually be like?

That’s a lot to think about.

More after the break.

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Got some spare minutes so I figured I would do some extra bloggening.

Is that a real word? Answer : it is now.

I feel like when I express my doom and gloom like I did in the above, it’s mostly catharsis, but it also feels kind of like I am looking for an exit.

I deeply intuit that there is some basic and profound flaw in my thinking that, were I only to find and correct it, would throw open the door of my grotty little cage and let me frisk and frolic in the sunshine at last.

And maybe that’s bullshit. Maybe it’s merely the wishful thinking of someone for whom thinking is always preferable to feeling, and the real door out of my cage will be found only when I give up on endless self-analysis and learn to face my problems without the oh so clear lens of rational analysis to protect me.

And I am trying. The various lessons in Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda are helping me. Like I said before, a lot of it is BS, but there is a lot of good stuff about the world outside of reason and the rational mind.

I do not, of course, expect that becoming thus illumined will make me a sorcerer who can teleport large distances in an instant or walk up the trunk of a tree like it was solid ground. But that was probably mostly an illustrative metaphor anyhow.

After all, consciousness expansion and enlightenment can definitely enable you to do things others cannot. They just tend to be somewhat intangible and dull.

Like being able to see the truth of a situation when others are mired in the delusions created by ancient social programming, or having deep insight into how someone ie feeling because of how well developed your empathy has become, or even being able to turn enemies into friends simply by not thinking of them as enemies but rather as people who do not understand you yet.

I have done all these things and more with my own brand of magic. Turns out that when empathy and reason act together, as one, extraordinary things can be done.

The sad part is, by choosing not to be a part of the whole team-picking us versus them mentality, you risk becoming, not without reason, mistrusted by all.

From their point of view, you are dangerously unpredictable, and who could trust someone like that?

I might know that I am always acting from the same set of principles, but they don’t. And even if they knew the principles, they still would not necessarily be able to predict how I would apply them in any situation.

So here I sit, innocently aloof.

I can’t join that petty, thoughtless world. I know too much, I see too much, I understand what is really going on all too well.

And yet, at the end of the day, I am still just a human being, with all the same emotional needs as everyone else.

I wish I could put down the gavel and be like everyone else. But it’s too late.

Guess I need someone willing to trust my intentions even when they cannot necessarily predict my every action.

There must be people out there like that, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Maybe that should be the title of all my blog entries, or even the name of the blog. It gets the basic idea across without restricting the content.

I mean, everything is a thought. When you think about it.

And I am, amongst other things, a thinker. I ponder things almost constantly though rarely consciously, and this magnificent mind of mine periodically outputs the results to my consciousness, and it would nice to have a place to put those thoughts when they are piping fresh from the oven and need time to cool.

As is, everything recirculates. Whatever pops into my consciousness gets put right back into the pot to cook some more, and while that has produced the exemplary bouillabaisse of my high quality thought, I think it also leads to an accumulation of little bits of bone and feather and skin at the bottom of the pot that tends to spoil the whole thing any chance it can.

That must be a record for both my most complex paragraph and my most overextended metaphor. I think a round of polite golf applause is warranted.

Thank you, thank you. You’re too kind.

I could seriously imagine this blog evolving into a Pikachu a formatless collection of my random thoughts left to stand all alone.

It might make it even less interesting to read, but it would make it serve its primary purpose – being a place to put the thoughts in my head so I can get some mental peace – far better than now.

I will give it some thought.

But odds are, nothing will change.

---

More thoughts on The Outer Worlds :

My main issue with the game – and it its a minor one, as evidence by the fact that I just played it for like three and a half hours straight – is that it’s a bit too easy.

The combat is not very challenging and thus there is no sense of danger to the fights, and therefore no stakes and no excitement.

With my two companions backing me up, I can kick the ass of anything they throw at me. There’s still occasional moments when the enemy overwhelms me and I die, but I am still not feeling the threat.

So I might bump it up to Hard mode. See how I like that.

That’s pretty rare for me in games, and that suggests to me that maybe they made the default setting a little too easy.

The PC snob in me says (Morris the Cat voice) “Well, they probably had to make it that easy for all the little kids playing on consoles. “

There is no end to the sins a PC snob will pin on the necessity to make games “accessible” for the people who use (voice dripping with scorn) consoles.

Game too easy? Consoles.
Game too hard? Consoles…. clearly, the game was programmed assuming you would be using a controller and not a mouse and keyboard LIKE A NORMAL PERSON,
Graphics pretty lame? It probably looks perfect on a CONSOLE.
Plot really stupid? They probably had to dumb it down for people on CONSOLES.
Game is glitchy as fuck? Well pardon me for playing it on an exciting, dynamic PC and not some stamped out by the millions CONSOLE.

But what about the truly excellent games, like Witcher 3? The games that are so good no PC gamer can say a word against them? The games that are the Casablanca-level games PC gamers adore?

What then, mister smarty pants?

Well it’s simple.

Those are PC games that were allowed to also be ported to consoles so that console gamers can see what a real game looks like, even if it’s probably wasted on them.

Yes, we really are that bad.

And I must be French, because I find that kind of pretentious snobbery hilarious.

Especially when I find it in myself.

---

Well that was bleedin’ unpleasant.

I was most of the way asleep when something in my room shifted and fell and made a loud bang sound.

This scared the shit out of me. Almost literally.

I went from zero to extremely startled and freaked out in the space of a heartbeat. That. in itself, is not too unusual.

For many years, I have gone through this period of hyperreflexia as I fall asleep. In it, even soft sounds, like someone closing a door in the apartment above, can trigger a strong startle response.

It’s damned irritating because the last thing you want when you are trying to sleep is to be jolted awake by a perfectly normal sound. The sort of thing you would barely even perceive when you are fully awake.

But this time was far worse than usual. It shook me up and I stayed shook. Hours later, I am still shaking a little bit. It was a severe blow to my system and, as if that wasn’t enough, I eventually had to get out of bed to go to the bathroom and ended up spending 45 minutes in there as my bowels spasmed and tried to tie themselves in knots.

IBS : It punishes you for being upset by things!

I only just got out of poop jail right before I started writing this. I am hoping that once I fully settle down, I will be able to take a good solid nap where I sleep the sleep of the dead and wake up with my system reset to factory defaults.

It’s so damned frustrating to have this sort of thing dropped on me out of the blue. Something purely random and mild kicks my ass and there’s nothing I can do about it except survive it and move on.

Like I am not already paranoid and mistrustful of the word. This sort of thing just confirms my deep seated belief that the world hates me and never tired of coming up with new and exciting ways of fucking with me.

But of course, that’s not really true.

The truth is it doesn’t give a shit about me at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The words, they do not come easily right now.

In fact, I kind of feel like each word is being pulled out of me painfully, like a bad tooth.

But that’s only because I have a headache.

Mental note : next time I am grocery shopping online, get one of those enormous bottles of Advil so I can medicate my headaches when needed.

That would go a long way towards reducing my burdens.

Speaking of online grocery shopping, the good news is that I have done my usual Sav-On Foods at Ironwood shopping online now.

The bad news : it won’t arrived till tomorrow between 3 pm and 5 pm.

Disappointing but not surprising. I was hoping that if I ordered early this morning, I might get it by this evening, but no.

I will have to make do till then. Which means I will probably spend the money I would have spent on Denny’s and spend it on ordering in yet again tonight.

That will make it the third night in a row that I have ordered in, which feels very decadent. I have to keep reminding myself that I am not spending any more than usual, I am just spending it a different way.

Well, there’s the $8 I am spending on grocery delivery. That’s not usual. But other than that, I am spending the money I would normally spend going out on ordering in.

I do worry that I am growing too comfortable with this hermit-like existence, though.

Last thing my agoraphobia needs is an extended period in which circumstances force me to indulge it completely.

I haven’t left the house since last Thursday and it’s looking like I won’t be leaving it till Tuesday evening, if then.

I admit, I am beginning to feel a tiny bit stir crazy. Which is fine – it’s when I no longer get the urge to go out at all that worries me.

Reminds me : have to call to cancel my Tuesday appointment at the health clinic tomorrow. That’s when I will ask about Ana’s snap diagnosis.

Maybe she was right to declare my wound healed. But I want a second opinion.

I have to be extra vigilant about not picking at the damned thing. Lately my brain has been extra sneaky about doing it before my sane superego can stop it, even sneaking it in when I am just waking up.

Scabs itch. Peeling them off relieves the itch. But peeling them off make the wound heal slower and can even make it get worse.

Bodies are dumb. They make you do things which are not in their own self-interest.

I am getting sick and tired of feeling so disrupted lately. Ordering my groceries online was a good step towards learning to create my own stability instead of leaning on others so heavily.

I am my own person.

But I feel so goddamned weak all the time. Like my mind is a hydraulic system with a leak in the line, so that instead of building the pressure up till it creates action, it just pours right out instead.

Anyone got any metaphorical duct tape?

More after the break.

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Yay, I AM leaving the house tonight. Gonna go out for a meal with Felicity.

My long hermitage is over! (Well, it seemed long to ME….)

I am pushing for Wendy’s because I want chili. 🙂 But really, anything is good as long as I get some social time outside the apartment.

Sadly, there will not be time for a trip to 7-11 so I can get some stuff to tide me over till tomorrow’s grocery delivery, so I will just get dropped off at the one near here.

Get my stuff then walk the TWO WHOLE BLOCKS home ALL BY MYSELF.

Sadly, that is my #adulting. Baby steps.

It’s weird how differential development works. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, with all these creative gifts as well, and yet, in many ways I am still a child.

Hence my image of myself as a giant brain in a diaper.

It’s a wild exaggeration, but it gets the basic idea across.

It’s satire…. subtlety is optional. It helps, but sometimes the best way to get your point across is to go way, way, way over the top.

Hence “A Modest Proposal”.

Swift knew that it would take something truly shocking to breah through England’s thick, calloused attitudes about the Irish having only themselves to blame for their plight and how they were all drunk wastrels and all that horrifying moral anaesthetic.

So he went for cannibalism. And to me, the beauty of that is not merely its shock value, it’s that there is no logical argument against it.

People had to either straight up admit that they don’t think of the Irish as human beings (as clearly indicated in their actions, attitudes, and policies) and pretend not to be horrified by Swift’s words, or admit that the Irish were human and therefore their own policies were barbaric and inhumane to the extreme.

I did something similar once, but my concern was Africa and my solution was far more distasteful than cannibalism :

It was child pornography. There’s clearly lots of money to be made in its production and distribution, and can you really say that an African child is better off dead from starvation than being a child porn star?

Or hell, child prostitution. Are you prepared to say into the microphone that it is better than an entire family starve then have one child forced to suck a dick?

All it would take is one starving poor African country to legalize child/adult sex and the production of kiddy porn and their country would become much richer overnight.

And is that really worse than mass starvation and civil war and child soldiers?

Or is the real problem that I am forcing you to think of brown African people as being real human beings just like the Irish?

I would get in so much trouble if that got widely distributed.

And I would love every minute of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hence “A Modest Proposal”.

Guess I am not going to make it to 7-11 today.

I just don’t have the spoons. I feel frazzled and vulnerable and shaky and I am barely keeping it together enough to blog.

Leaving the apartment is out of the question.

Thing is, it would be all too easy for me to put a lot of pressure on myself to do it, and then beat myself up with a vengeance over not doing it, but that would be pointless.

Putting pressure on myself never works. It just makes me avoid the thing all the harder. That’s how I respond to that kind of pressure : not well.

Of course, a lack of pressure yields the same result. Hence the paradox.

The only way out is to find my inner motivation for going and fan that flame. And that takes time and energy I do not currently have.

Maybe I will find it some time soon. Maybe not.

Either way is fine.

Either way, I am fine.

And so forth and so on.

---

Well that was fucking irritating.

I tried to route around the problem by ordering some groceries from Real Canadian Superstore via Instacart, and got through the whole process of ordering and was getting quite excited about the whole thing – especially because they have a kind of sugar-free Voortmans cookies (orange creme) that Sav-on does not – but at the very end of the process, it rejected my credit card because they don’t car prepaid cards.

Son of a fucking bitch, why not? They get paid exactly the same as if I was using an old-school Visa, so why discriminate?

It’s especially galling from Superstore, because prepaid is the exact kind of Visa their demographic is most likely to have.

Visa is not normally keen to sign up the working poor and people on welfare.

Plus I was willing to pay them $8 to deliver! Presumably that’s the weekend price.

And I was so happy that their minimum order was only $10. Sav-on’s minimum was $40 last time I checked, and that’s just plain looney tunes in my opinion.

I mean, true, that’s how much I spend when I do my weekly shopping there, so I suppose if things go totally tits-up tomorrow and I don’t get to do my usual Sunday shopping, I have that as a backup.

But still. $40 is a lot of money.

And I am still pissed off at being a victim of credit card classism.

---

Oh well, at least the Epic Store took my credit card.

I finally bought a brand-new game yesterday. And I mean REALLY brand new, as it was actually released yesterday.

It doesn’t get any more current than that.

It’s called The Outer Worlds, and because it was the day of its release, it took around 10 hours for it to download. Yikes.

If it had been on Steam, it would have taken about three hours to get a 40 gig game. But that’s under normal conditions, not the release day for a hotly anticipated game.

I was originally going to get Borderlands 3. I just beat the previous game, the Pre-Sequel, this morning, and it would have totally made sense to keep going with the latest game in the series, which came out earlier this year.

But then I was on Metacritic poking about on their Best Recent Games list, and I read the description and the reviews for The Outer World, and it sounded so much like my kind of thing that I decided to spend that sweet GST check money on it instead.

I’ve played it for about four hours now, and so far, it’s pretty damned good.

Which is good, because it cost me $83!

---

I suppose I should record my impressions of the game itself.

It’s very good, and totally derivative.

It’s good in that it is exactly the kind of open-world, quest-filled, RPG type game that I love. The graphics are great, the writing is somewhat amusing, and so far anyhow, I have having a great time.

However, it is rather nakedly a clone of two big game series : Bioshock and Fallout.

Mostly Fallout. It’s clear that Obsidian, the game’s devs, wanted to make themselves something like the massively popular Fallout series, and by golly, that’s what they did. There isn’t a single game element that doesn’t feel like it was lifted from Fallout 4 thne given the barest of scrubs to make it not, technically, the same thing.

Bioshock mostly influences the art design, with all kinds of cheesy old-timey advertising motifs from the age of the horse and buggy and the cracker barrel, mixed in with sci fi high tech like spaceships, plasma rifles, and FTL travel.

So yeah. The game is totally derivative.,

And I don’t care.

Originality is great and all. but nowhere near as important as quality. I would much rather something high quality and corny than any brilliantly original failure any day.

Especially if I am paying $83 for the game.

So as far as the game how she plays, I am 100 percent on board.

The game, how she runs, however… well….

In a word : poorly.

There is a fair bit of frame dragging and a lot of long pauses, especially, for some reason, with the dialogue.

I will start talking to a character and they will just sit there impassively, saying absolutely nothing, for up to fifteen seconds or more, making the whole thing seem awkward.

Like they are giving you the silent treatment because they haven’t made up their mind whether or not to talk to you yet.

At first, I thought the fault was with my computer. I figured the honeymoon where I could play everything with top settings was over because this was a game from right now and my computer is three or four years old.

But now I am not so sure. After all, my computer plays some recent-ish games quite well. So that can’t be the whole story.

More likely is that part of the problem is that I got the game on the day it came up and am I therefore getting it before it’s been patched a million times to make it run right.

Plus, changing the settings from high to low barely improved things. So it can’t just be that my beloved ‘puter is lacking in the horsepower to make the game go.

Oh well. The game is great despite the issues, and it’s time for me to finish blogging so I can go back to playing it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been feeling really depressed lately.

I feel so overwhelmed by everything. I feel freaked out all the time. Normal things seem spooky. Normal sounds seem too loud and like they are coming from everywhere at once. I feel too cold and too hot at the same time.

And I am so damned tense. Like an over-wound spring, ready to snap. I feel like at any second, I could freak out and start screaming.

As a result, I have been having a heck of a hard time getting out of bed. I want to just stay in bed and sleep just to avoid having to deal with reality at all.

Like I always say, sleep is death without the commitment. Being asleep is the closest thing to being dead you can experience without actually being dead.

Either way, you don’t have to deal with the world. One just lasts longer.

As usual, as far as I know there is no particular reason for me to be extra depressed right now. I haven’t had any new stressors or traumae. I haven’t had sad news, a financial setback, or any horrifying revelations.

In fact, if anything, I am doing a little better than usual. Yay GST cheques.

The only contributing factor I can name is that it’s a very windy day and hence a rather loud one. The wind battering our apartment building makes a lot of noise, and the building sways slightly at the peak of the gust.

Which is, admittedly, kind of disturbing. But that which bends does not break.

On the bright side, this intensification of depression may well represent growth. I have been pushing against the limits of my life pretty hard lately and doing my best to outgrow them, and there are bound to be some growing pains as previous structures that are now too small for me constrict me before breaking.

Well that’s not going to stop me. Bring it. I will gladly endure the pain of my restraints biting into my flesh as I grow if it means they soon will shatter.

There are worse things in life than anxiety. I will let anxiety ride me to the point of requiring restraint or even catatonia if that is what it takes for me to break my inner bonds and be able to live strong and free at last.

Actually, a catatonic trance sounds kind of nice right now. Restful. Like a little vacation from having to deal with anything at all.

Probably emerge from it feeling really refreshed.

I picture myself waking up in a hospital bed, stretching my slightly atrophied muscles, then looking around at all the worried faces staring at me and saying “What?”.

Or maybe “I suppose you’re wondering why I gathered you all here…. ”

I suppose that’s not the sort of thing one can do voluntarily, though.

I mean, I suppose you could fake it, but that’s way too much of a commitment for me.

More after the break.

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Feeling somewhat better now. Still feeling anxious and irritable and strange but it is down to a more manageable level.

Looks like social hanging out isn’t going to happen tonight. Joe being sick has really added a lot of turbulence to my life.

See, Felicity’s parents are both recovering from operations, and so they need her around, and Felicity sure as shit doesn’t want to bring back any bug Joe and Julian and I might be carrying to her parents, so we can’t hang out for now.

Which means I am not getting my usual chances to buy my supplies. Which means once more, I am about to run out.

Which suuuuucks big time.

Next time I get a chance, I should buy like there’s the storm of the century coming. Just stock up big time so I can survive this period of chaos.

As is, I am going to have to make the trek to 7-11 soonishly. A whole two blocks, and back again, oh my!

But it’s not the distance, it’s the leaving. Leaving the comfort of my little nest and going out into the cold cruel overstimulating world all alone.

The 7-11 could be next door and it would still be roughly the same amount of challenge to my social anxiety.

Not exactly the same, because the effort and the length of exposure do count. But the biggest cost is incurred when I leave my apartment building.

That costs me a lot of spoons.

Still,I have been realizing how dependent on others I have been, specifically relying on them to supply the energy for things instead of generating it myself, and so I will try hardest to coax myself out to 7-11 some time soon.

Not tonight. I need more time to work up the energy. Plus, it’s dark and cold out there right now. Fuck that noise.

But tomorrow, probably tomorrow around lunch time, so I can pick up a Jamaican Patty or a sandwich or something as a treat.

Still pissed our local one stopped doing samosas. Those were good.

I realize that nobody can build a better life for myself but me. And to be honest, part of me feels utter despair at that thought because I have no faith in my ability to do it myself and therefore that means I am fucked.

But it’s not true. I can do this. I can build a better life for myself. I can take my fate into my own hands and do for myself what I deserved to have done for me as a child, but never got because nobody thought about me at all.

So they got away with it. That doesn’t mean I have to compound their crime by continuing their pattern of neglect and abuse.

I can break the cycle.

I can walk in freedom.

I can be a man at last.

All I have to do is put in the effort.

Oh right…. effort.

I’m working on it.

---

Crap, I totally forgot that I wasn’t done writing this entry yet!

Oh, the shame of it all, missing deadline for non-convention or hospitalization reasons for the first time in eight years!

Truly, I am a wretched fool cast upon the shores of my own folly!

Now I must atone by beating myself with reeds of birch and…. meh.

I’m already over it. Whatever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was originally going to do a whole “I hate my stupid fucking life” thing today so I could get some of my negatives out, but fuck it, I am too tired after errands to do it, so I will try something a little more mellow instead.

It’s true that I seriously hate my stupid fucking life. Nothing in it is good enough. Nothing in it is right.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet, absurdly gifted, and a heck of a nice guy to boot (and oh so modest) rotting away in a filthy bedroom in an apartment full of garbage and random crap, playing video games all day while life passes me by with a vengeance.

And all because I am locked in a cage by my mental fucking illness.

No sex life. No work life. If it wasn’t for my friends, I would have no social life either.

So thank God for my friends. Without them I would be far more insane.

But it’s not enough, There is so much of live that I want to experience but my mental illness and its ball and chain of fear and depression hold me back.

Dammit. My mind keeps wandering. Sure, add that to my day, why the fuck not.

I am so tired of this dead-end existence of mine. I deserve so much better than this. I should be out there making mad cash with my extraordinary talents, with my own place that is nice and clean and full of beautiful things that make me happy when I look at them and all kinds of creature comforts like a really good bed with really soft and cozy bedding, a sweet-ass computer with a sweet-ass computer desk and like the world’s most ergonomic chair to sit in, top notch room to room audio, and so on and so forth,

And I should have a stable and loving boyfriend who thinks I am brilliant and wonderful and who pampers me while I dote on him and who lets me shower him with the exuberant affection that is my nature while giving me the kind of quiet, calm, steadying love I need when my demons are screaming and trying to fly away with me so I need someone to anchor me and hold me tight.

And I deserve an exciting and rewarding career where I make fantastic, out of this world, top quality art with a fantastic group of talented, fun, creative people and jump out of bed at the start of every day because I am so happy to get back to making the magic with my extended family of collaborators.

And what the hell. I deserve an eclectic collection of critters to look after and dote on. Probably mostly cats, admittedly, but other critters as well.

I would love to have a neat little micro-farm, with a few cows, a couple of goats, a horse or two, a couple of scruffy country dogs, and enough land for them to all be happy in my tiny slice of bucolic heaven.

I’m not sure about chicken. Fresh eggs are amazingly good but chickens are not pleasant animals and I am not sure if I would want them around.

Well, somehow, this turned into Fru’s Perfect Life. Kind of the opposite of the angry rant about how my life sucks I had planned.

And yet, kind of the same thing as well.

More after the break.

---

Another thing about my ideal living space : NO CLUTTER. None! Nothing would ever be left just lying around, whether I have to put it away myself or I can afford servants to do it for me. Everything would be put away.

I am so sick of crap everywhere that I am totally willing to submit to the very “a place for everything and everything in its place” mentality that I have always found icky before.

Beats the hell out of feeling like I live at the bottom of a pile of rubble.

I might have items like throw pillows, cushions, and other comfy things around in a clutter-ish fashion – I am still not sure how to keep a place neat and tidy without making it feel blank and barren and antiseptic.

But the point is, things would not make me sad or mad when I look at them.

There is a strong desire for order and tidiness buried under my usual timid laziness and I am determined to excavate it, god damn it.

And there will be cats. Plural. The best toy for a cat is another cat, and in this fantasy life of mine I might not be home a lot, so I would want at least two cats so they could keep themselves amused while I am away.

I can’t imagine my going full on crazy cat person, as I would be too worried about the cats’ health and welfare to let things get out of hand.

But I might become a person with a crazy amount of cats. But they would be healthy cats living in a clean and healthy environment.

Right now, in my head, the place I am describing is a modest two bedroom apartment someplace fun, like the Commercial Drive area.

I wouldn’t want a big place. Not if I am there all alone. I could be quite happy in a two bedroom place, with the extra bedroom used as an office or library or whatnot.

Heck, I would be happy with a one bedroom place if it was nice enough.

And to be honest, it would be nice to start over somewhere new. Abandon my white elephant of a king sized bed ^[1] and all the rest of the crap I have been moving to place to place without ever using and just take my computer, my books, and my clothes, and start over in a clean new apartment, and KEEP IT THAT WAY.

From there forward, I could choose each thing that enters my home based on how much it pleases me. Nothing ugly or disharmonious would be allowed in.

I could build myself quite the little nest if I started over somewhere.

But I would have to leave my current life behind first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Right now, our apartment is a “sick house”.

That means a home where everyone in it is sick with the same thing. In the olden days of huge families and no central heating, this meant that the local women had to organize to pick a group of them to go to the “sick house” to look after the housework and the doctoring until enough of the women of the house in question were well enough to do it themselves.

Serious business, if you think about it. Without someone to look after the sick family, one nasty bug going around could wipe the family out completely as there would be nobody to even keep the stove going, let alone cook and clean.

Luckily, we live in the modern era of premade food, central heating, and penicillin, so we should be fine in a day or two.

Myself, I don’t quite have the bug yet but I can feel it trying to gain a foothold. My nose is getting a tiny bit runny, my throat is just a little scratchy, and I can feel my lungs just itching to start filling with goo.,

So I am doing my best to get lots of fluids and vitamin C, and hope this particular plague passes me by.

On the oither hand, I would kind of like to go cash my cheque and then do some shopping today. I am out of my usual supplies and I really don’t want to have to improvise every meal until after therapy tomorrow.

That’s four meals. And true, I can order in for one or two of those.

The other ones, though… I might have to actually cook.

I mean, in theory I still know how.

What I am really craving right now is pasta. And we gots da noodles and we gots da sauce. That’s not a problem.

But making pasta involves a certain amount of standing over a hot stove, especially with the sauce. And I am not sure I feel up to that.

I will probably end up ordering pasta from Pizza Hut, and figuring out something else for those other two meals.

Either that, or I will somehow summon the gumption to either walk two blocks to 7-11 in order to spend my last $14 on supplies, or to take a cab to the bank, then walk to Pricesmart, get groceries, and cab it back home.

Before I do any of that, though, I will take a good solid nap and see how the world feels to me when I get back up.

Maybe I will have the wherewithal to GTFO of the apartment and take care of things, and maybe I will not.

Either way, I will deal with it. Persist, endure, overcome. There is no problem that can’t be dealt with as long as I resist the urge to flee and keep pressing onward until I win via sheer grit and determination.

Now Imma go lay down, cuddle my teddy bear, and sleep like a baby.

More after the break.

---

Well I didn’t make it out to the bank. No real surprise there. I have been feeling pretty depressed lately. And it seems to be building to a peak.

Had an “I hate my life” moment earlier, and that’s never good. It was even followed by a “I hate my stupid fucking life”, which is new.

And bad. Very bad.

There is no one thing wrecking my mood. Some of the usual suspects are there, like a very small bit of financial insecurity due to the usual too much month at the end of the money type thing.

No big deal. All will be solved tomorrow when I cash my disability and GST cheques.

And I try not to sweat the little stuff, but that’s hard to do when it’s all you got.

Plus I think I have a fundamentally high strung, nervous nature. I need things to stress and fret about, if only just to give my nerves an outlet for deeper, less specific stress and worry bubbling up from down below.

Who knows, though. If I had financial security and sufficient material comfort, I might actually be able to relax for a while.

Or at least I would be fretting over something productive.

---

Still digging my way through Carlos Casteneda’s Tales of Power.

I have arrived at what I assume is his central thesis, this idea that there is the tonal, which is all the things we can name and define and mentally apprehend, and then there is the nagual, which is everything else.

These are useful and interesting concepts because they let us peer over the edge of our own consciousness and see that, despite what our arrogant powers of reason would like us to believe, even the brighests of minds (ahem) contain but a tiny fraction of all potential knowledge and understanding, and there is a vast universe out there, with countless things beyond our understanding even as concepts, let alone realities.

One might say, then, that when out minds expand, the naugual is what it expands into. It is the medium in which our limited, finite minds float.

Casteneda then goes on to talk about how one way to look at these two concepts is to see the tonal as representing the world of reason and the nagual as representing the world of will.

And that’s where he loses me.

I have no problem imagining the world of reason – after all, I have lived there for my entire life so far – but I can’t imagine the world of the will.

Is he talking about imagination? Or creativity? Is the naugual merely another name for the subconscious mind?

Or is it more like Nietzsche rule-making will, that which in us which says “This makes you feel pain. That makes you feel pleasure. “?

I honestly don’t know. Reading this work is at times frustrating because at times it seems like genuine wisdom and at other times it seems like cheesy New Age confabulism meant to dazzle people who like the warm thrill of confusion and mistake that feeling for being deep.

I will read on, doing my best not to judge but to simply enjoy.

Perhaps I will venture into my naugual myself one of these days.

Who knows what I may find out there in the dark?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The heat coming up off Belmont Street soothed me.

It was a hot July day and I was eight years old. I was sitting on the street, my butt on the sizzling pavement. I could smell the tar of the patches on the road’s asphalt melting from the heat.

My rear end hurt a little from the heat, but I was too busy pressing my hand to the pavement in order to feel the slight sizzle of dead skin burning away to notice.

I loved that sizzle. It felt good to me. Now and then, I would rub my hands on my shorts to rub away the traces of burnt skin, and that felt good too.

It made my hands feel really clean in a way I found quite pleasing.

Nearby, the ants I had been watching earlier streamed by. I found the ants fascinating in their random yet organized patterns. I would watch them and try to figure out what they were up to and why they did what they did.

But being eight years old, my attention span was shorter than I was, and I had soon grown bored of my adventures as a junior field entomologist, and now I was playing the hand burning game.

I wasn’t consciously lonely. I never was as long as I was wrapped up in my own little world. As long as I kept my mind busy, the bad feelings stayed dormant.

But not forever. They always found me eventually.

Earlier that day has been one of those moments. It had been one of those moments that initially drew me out into the street. I had been sitting in the living room, watching TV, when I heard the sound of children playing.

This excited me, because as a very lonely child with no friends at school and not much attention paid to me at home, I was desperate for other kids to play with.

I hadn’t given up on that yet.

So I had wandered outside in search of these other kids. But I hadn’t gone more than half a block before I suddenly stopped because I felt terribly scared and confused all of a sudden, and didn’t know why.

And then I had realized that I couldn’t hear the kids playing any more. And no matter how hard I looked as I wandered through the neighborhood, I couldn’t find the kids I had heard playing earlier before.

And so I had returned home feeling wretched and confused.

I had heard them so clearly. But now they weren’t there. Where had they gone? Were they hiding from me? Had they ever been there in the first place?

I didn’t have any answers for all those questions. And I didn’t know what to do with all the emotions they brought up.

And that’s when I had started watching the ants. Filled my mind with their tiny world, and thus pushed all the bad thoughts and the pain away.

And now I was doing the same thing by hurting myself.

The pain felt kind of good.

---

Interesting stuff I just wrote. It felt right. I may do more.

But right now, I wish to discuss my surprise liberation.

I went in to the health center to get my weekly bandage change, and was quite surprised when the nurse, Ana, pronounced me healed and said I didn’t need to wear the compression stockings any more.

I thought I would be going for at least one more week, so…wow.

And I know I should be happy to be free of the fucking thing that has kept me from taking a proper shower or bath for months now, and I am.

But neurosis never sleeps, and I can’t help wondering about Ana’s objectivity, as when I came in, she was talking to another nurse about some procedure and kept insisting that she would do it and she was clearly eager to go do that thing.

So when she looked at my former wound and declared me healed, she was choosing the option that meant she got to go do the thing she wanted to do right away.

Hence, I question her objectivity. She barely glanced at the area in question. Adn while I will admit that the area is looking quite good, I would not, personally, declared myself to be healed. The wound is fully closed, but there is still a bump of discolored flesh in that area and it has other discolored areas on it.

So I am now worrying that I might have been “discharged early”, so to speak. I think I am going to call the health center under the guise of canceling my final appointment and asking straight out whether Ana was supposed to do what she did.

Because I am thinking no, she was not. The decision was so quick and rash and based on so little information and so clearly motivated by her eagerness to do another, presumably a lot more interesting procedure that I can’t help questioning it.

Ergo, I know I should call and ask. But I am also feeling pretty sleepy. I was feeling sleepy before I went to the clinic and I am even sleepier now.

And it’s a cold but sunny day, and I really feel like just curling up under my comforter and let time slide by for a while.

Sleep’s good for that. Takes me right out of the time stream. Transports me to the future. It’s like life’s fast-forward button.

So what will probably happen is that I will lay down for a bit and just gamble on napping for short enough a span of time that the place is still open when I wake up.

If not, I can always call tomorrow.

I hope I don’t end up getting Ana in trouble, but if I do, whatev. This is my health on the line. I can’t afford to get sick from being “nice”.

It could be nothing, of course.

But I don’t like taking that kind of risk.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We;ll, for what it’s worth, it worked.

Took my sleeping pill – mirtazapine – this morning before going to bed, and I have spent most of the day asleep as a result.

Which is par for the course for Mondays. The difference this time is that it’s been long, continuous sleep and not the minefield of minor naps I usually endure.

So bravo on that front. Mission accomplished. I will, no doubt, return to my stasis chamber after finishing this part of my blogging and get yet more deep REM-heavy sleep and get closer to catching up.

I definitely feel like I did a boffo amount of dreaming today, but I can’t recall any of it. What will probably happen is that some random thing I experience in my waking life will trigger something and it will all come flooding back to me.

Hope I am home in bed when that happens. It’s an intense experience , much like having a vision, and it burns through a lot of brain calories really fast.

I’d hate to have that happen on the bus.

I wish I did remember some of my dreams right now because then I could write them down in this a-here blog o’ mine. I find there to be something incredibly satisfying about writing down my dreams.

It’s intensely cathartic. Like I am flushing out a part of my mind that desperately needs it and my mindscape is all fresh and clean and bright afterwards.

Hmmm. I wonder if that means that a lot of the fog in my head is made of unprocessed dreams. That would make a lot of sense, at least metaphorically.

Not sure how to make my mind finish processing those dreams. I intuit that part of the problem is how I go about forcing myself to wake up and pull myself together so that I can get on with things.

In doing that, I stuff all those wisps of cobweb and mushroom cloud left over from my dreams into some pocket of my mind that has never seen the light of day, and that place gets pretty damned full over time, displacing my conscious mind.

No wonder it’s so crowded in my mind. There’s boxes everywhere!

Presumably, cleaning out my overstuffed mental attic takes more than all this wordsmithery in which I indulge.

Don’t get me wrong – writing this blog is extremely helpful to me. Getting my thoughts out of my head and onto the page makes me feel a heck of a lot better.

But it’s a slow and painstakingly delicate process, and I can’t help wondering if something more in the Eastern meditation school of things might speed things up.

After all, the cultures from which they originate have been perfecting their mastery of their own minds for millennia.

Surely that means they know a thing or two about clearing the detritus out of one’s mind and tuning it as an instrument.

And man, is mine in need of cleaning and tuning and setting right.

More after the break.

---

Experiment against compulsion

I’m playing Borderlands : The Pre-Sequel right now.

Well, sort of. It’s puased in another window. Normally, I would exit out of the game before I resumed my blogginating, but this time I chose to merely pause the game.

And it’s not, like you might think, in order to avoid a long initial loading time. The game is from 2014. That’s five years ago, or something like fifty in video game years, so it loads quite quickly on my “good to play anything made today” computer.

Pillars of Eternity 2, on the other hand, is from 2018, aka just last year, so it takes a while to load up, especially compared to all the ancient games I end up playing.

So no, the reason I left it on pause is not to evade long loading times.

It’s because it will really bug me.

Let me explain. I am someone with a strong compulsion to finish what I start. And when I exit the game before blogging, that makes that session of the game officially “over” and gives me permission to switch to blogging.

Thus, the compulsion is satisfied.

But you know what? Fuck compulsions. I am sick and tired of being bossed around by them. They are nothing but mental itches and can be ignored when they get out of hand and start making life worse.

And that is what I am doing right now. Part of me really, really wants to go close the game, but I am not letting myself do so.

Go ahead and itch away. I ain’t gonna scratch.

I think a weak character like myself ends up riddled with compulsions because they act as a crude substitute for actual motivation.

Compulsions don’t motivate. They compel. There is no need for a decision to act. You never have to figure out what you want to do when you are at the mercy of both negative and positive compulsions.

Otherwise known as “things you’re compelled to do and things you are compelled to avoid doing at all costs”.

Thus, my compulsions, aversions, and other mental phobias keep me from having to face that infinite hallway of infinite doors. The option paralysis that I normally face lies dormant because of how my compulsions limit my possibilities.

And all because I lack that vital “evil Kirk” id function that allows people to make strong decisions and then live with them without constantly looking back and second-guessing those same decisions.

I’m working on it.

I blame my wimpiness and timidity on the lack of an acceptable father figure in my childhood. My actual father we not suited to the job. His impatience and irritability made him the wrong person to handle me.

Honestly, I was too scared of him to relax and bond with him much.

Fathers, according to research, are supposed to encourage their kids to take risks, explore their boundaries, overcome their fears, and in general cope with the world.

Without that influence, you get the classic “mama’s boy” : timid, fearful, prone to escapism, lacking in courage and character, and overall, pretty wimpy.

Nobody ever taught me to keep doing despite being scared. Admittedly, given how clever and willful I was, this would not have been easy.

But it would have been better than being such a goddamned pussy.

And this is not about living up to some macho ideal. This is simply about having the courage and strength of character to deal with life’s challenges without simply running away and hiding from the world.

That kind of grit is something I admire and covet. I really wish there had been someone in my life who pushed me to excel despite how easy everything was.

As is, I wonder if it’s too late for me.

Must I always shiver in the shadow of my own cowardice?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.