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.