Last night, I was pondering how my life felt like a long dark corridor leading nowhere, holding the image of said corridor in my mind as I did so, when suddenly the image changed into a long dark…. library.

Or at the very least, that’s my best attempt at describing the experience. I am new at describing these kinds of non-rational experiences, after all.

Speaking of which, an earlier, less enlightened me would have vehemently suppressed that spontaneous transformation and pretend it never happened out of fear of the implied chaos and disorder.

That seems quite sad to me now, although I am by no means out of those particular woods. Clearly my mind if trying to tell me something.

I don’t know what it is yet, but that’s to be expected.

If it was easy to understand, my rational mind could have handled it.

Instead of suppression, I am embracing this transformation instead. And I am quite excited by the prospect of trying to figure out what it means.

The long dark corridor image has always, to me, represented my depressive life. How it feels like my life is nothing but a long dark corridor leading nowhere and with nothing in it, not even sound, and ending only when I meet my silent and pathetic death.

There’s times when I have found the image soothing and times when I found it smothering and times when I found it cold and alienating, but what it represented never changed… until last night,

So what change does this new image represent?

My intuition says it has something to do with the corridor expanding to encompass something about my mind. Like perhaps the books are my memories and the shift in imagery represents my mind’s attempt to start directly accessing all those long surpressed traumae directly instead of going through the conscious mind.

The conscious mind is too damn slow for this kind of work. Emotions may not be “smart” but they sure are swift.

The memory theory seems wrong somehow, though. It’s suspiciously neat andplausible. I have the feeling that there’s a lot more to this than that.

Certainly, libraries have always made me feel safe. I used to hide from my bullies in the school library, which was of course also full of books, which I loved. And they are also wonderfully quiet, which soothed my nerves.

To this day, then, being in a library or bookstore makes me feel calm and safe. So it would be easy to declare this transformation to be an attempt for my mind to soothe itself with a more familiar and nonthreatening image.

But that’s not it either. I can feel it in my bones.

Perhaps I need to relax and let the image thaw out for a while. It came to me wrapped in that icy cold feeling I have come to associate with recovery, and it could be that I will not grok it until the icicles melt off.

Heck, I got icicles in my heart just from talking about this.

And that’s good. Means it is working.

More after the break.

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Looks like I am not going to review those other two games.

Quick summary : two dungeon-crawling and board game mashups that seem promising but are ultimately tedious to play.

Today has been weird.

I have felt cold all day, and didn’t really think much of it. Thought it was just because I had the window in my bathroom open a couple inches.

It is winter, after all.

So I closed the window. Still felt cold later. Turned up the heat. Still feel cold. Weird.

Then I am woken out of a nap by a feeling like someone is pushing up hard on my right foot. Like they are trying to my leg shorter by brute force alone.

That freaked me out. Luckily, it passed in around five seconds, but seriously, what the fuck? It was such a weird sensation that it felt downright spooky.

It’s always super weird when you body does something on its own that normally you would have to tell it to do.

It’s like someone else is controlling your body.

And they totally suck at it.

It happened again when I was trying to go back to sleep around half an hour later.

I really, really hope this is not the new normal.

The only thing I can think of to compare it to was the charlie-horses I used to get during my seriously big growth spurts when I was a teen.

I would be woken from a deep and sound sleep by intense pain from my legs as the muscles tied themselves into one big knotted cramp.

It’s a terrible way to wake up. Would not recommend. Zero stars.

I would then end up pacing to relieve the tension and steeling myself to do what I knew had to be done, namely put weight on the cramped leg and flex it, which would hurt like a son of a bitch but stretch out the cramp.

It was the only way to get rid of the cramp. The only alternative was to wait for the cramp to relax on its own, and that took forever.

So it was a real “rip off the band-aid” type situation. Either stretch out the cramp and suffer a whole lot all at once, or suffer the same amount stretched out over time.

I just wanted to go back to sleep. So I stepped on that motherfucker. But I was still a wimp. so I would do it a little bit at a time.

Worst of both worlds, arguably.

I would find doing it all at once much easier now. My will is stronger and I am more in control of myself. Plus my adult’s greater sense of the future lets me focus on the relief that will come after the pain, and that helps a lot.

Oh, and between the two bouts of neuromuscular weirdness, I took a dump, and let’s just say my bowels were playing it fast and loose.

And now it’s 6:30 pm, the heat has been on for hours, and I still feel cold.

Methinks I might be coming down with something.

Which totally sucks. Because I want to go out tonight. I want to go do Subway with Le Gang then watch videos back at Felicity’s Parents’ place.

But I can’t go out if I am feeling sick and my bowels feel this…. infirm.

All I can say about that is, well….. phooey.

So how was YOUR day?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still feeling pretty depressed.

Managed to make it to FRED last night, and enjoyed myself as usual. Btu when the fun was over I felt used up and tired and depressed, so I ended up not making it to Felicity’s parents place to watch videos.

I was too depressed to do it. Not doing it made me even more depressed.

Funny how that works out.

I think it’s at least partly seasonal. The days are getting mighty short and I think that does bad things to my head. Makes being morose ever so much easier.

Explains a lot about Scandinavia. Especially Finland.

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Between emotion and reality

Been thinking a lot about emotions versus reality lately. Specifically, people not being able to tell the difference between the two.

I’ve talked about this many times before.

Basically, people think things are how they feel. And this is not always a bad thing. Our emotions are a very important part of how we sense and deal with the world.

Our cave dwelling ancestors didn’t need to think about whether they should run away from the cave bear. They just had to do what the emotion of fear told them.

Well, okay, maybe my ancestors had to think about it. Or me in a previous life.

The problem comes when people lack the ability to tell the difference between how they feel about something and the reality of it.

My usual example is racism. Racists can’t tell the difference between how looking at a black person makes them feel – angry and afraid – and what is actually true of said black people. They accept emotion as perception, exactly like their other perceptions like sight, touch, and smell.

To think otherwise would require a degree of mental flexibility and the ability to judge and doubt one’s own perceptions known as “metaconsciousness”.

And to me, the jury is out on whether or not everyone can do that. It might well be that people of average intelligence cannot perform those kinds of mental gymnastics except, when pressed, in defense of their existing attitudes.

This makes it doubly important that my fellow liberals and I stop worrying about sounding smart or being one hundred percent accurate and concentrate instead omn doing what the conservative media already does : speak to people in down to earth emotional language anyone can understand.

I don’t claim to be immune to this mistaking of emotion for reality. None of us are immune. The whole deal with my depression can be defined as how I feel about things (terrible) overriding my perceptions of the reality of things (not nearly so bad).

Right now, I am juuuust starting to feel the icy cold fingers of dread about the fact that I am going to be doing more standup comedy Wednesday night.

To be clear, I am dreading doing something I thoroughly enjoyed last time and have every expectation of enjoying again.

And I know how fucked up that is.

And if I try very, very hard, I can stop it.

But it will be back.

And that’s the most fucked up thing of all.

More after the break.

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Wow. Just…. wow.

That really spoke to me.

I guess my other two game reviews will have to wait.

What really got to me was the image of all the crazy mean hurtful things going straight to the inner child version of her.

I never thought of it that way but it makes perfect sense and the more I think about it, the more I feel something good and shiny and strong struggling to wake up deep, deep inside of me.

I would do anything to protect that sad little boy inside me. He’s been through so much and is so scared and alienated and isolated and alone. The thought of doing, or even failing to prevent, anything that would harm him makes my heart freeze.

And yet, there he is, at the bottom of the deep dark well he has dwelt in since he was raped by a stranger when he was only four years old.

Back then, the well was just a place to hide from the horror of what was happening. A safe place in the mind, a secret garden, where nothing could hurt me or touch me.

But I was too weak to get out again. Still am.

And all my negative thoughts – the ones I only know how to block out by playing video games all the goddamned time – go sliding down into the darkness into that well and hurt that sad little boy so much.

And I just want to take him and hold him and press him close to my heart and give him all the love and joy and warmth and acceptance and life he has never gotten down there in the darkness, so far away from everything.

I want to hold him and love him till the ice melts and the walls between us collapse and the joyful,. cheerful, beautiful, adorable child I once was is reborn into this world and can finally resume growing up into the truly amazing person I know he can be.

The seed contains the flower. All it needs is light and warmth and moisture and some good wholesome nutrients from the soil and it can rise and grow strong and bloom for all the world to see.

I am trying to hard to find the light. Burrowing around, trying to drill a hole through my shell to let the light in so I can live and grow again.

I want to feel alive.

I want to be healthy and strong.

I want to uncork the bottle on my vital energies and feel them flowing through my veins so they can rise like sap in spring and wake up my sleeping frozen self as they delivery vital oxygen and nutrients to all my cold and tired extremities.

I want to face the sun and stretch my limbs and be grateful to be alive on Planet Earth to witness all its beauty and wonder.

I want to live, dammit.

And some day, god dammit, I will.

I will also talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Bought another of those little bundles of games, and I will review them shortly.

But first, I have realized that it doesn’t really matter all that much to me whether any of the games is good enough to become my major game du jour, like Fallout New Vegas is right at this moment.

In fact, it doesn’t even matter if I ever play them again after first trying them out.

The fun of trying out new games, maybe even ones I would never had tried had they not landed in the bargain been, is worth the price of admission all by itself.

The price of admission being less than a dollar each this time.

Now, on to the games :

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Anna’s Quest. A fairly typical storybook style point and click adventure.

Anna is a little girl who gets captured by a thoroughly evil witch and has to escape the witch’s clutches and find the medicine to cure her ailing grandpa.

I say the game is typical, but that’s not quite true. It is typical in the broad strokes – narration by a kindly older narrator, page-turning style transitions, plenty of gently plucked harp and softly tapped xylophone in the sound track, and so on – but the details hold some charm and allure.

Anna, for instance, is not some young heroine who rises the occasion to be a stalwart hero both brave a true. She’s just a little girl with a little girl’s timid but sincere reactions to the strange and terrible circumstances she is in..

Similarly, the evil witch, while still being very evil and witchy, also has reactions that are more everyday and relatable than most villains.

Most importantly. the game gets a passing grade on whether or not the puzzles make sense. Not quite as good as the two horror games from the last batch, but still, the puzzles all make sense once you have solved them.

So I give this game a solid B+ recommend. Worth a try if you like the genre.

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JYDGE. A surprisingly deep arcade-style top down shooter.

You wouldn’t think this sort of game would even still be around, let alone be as good as this one. The graphics are quite simple as are the mechanics of play, Move your character with the WSAD keys, point and click to ain and shoot, and that is about it.

But this is no lazy programming exercise. It’s a game whose seeming simplicity belies a game as fast paced and exciting as any big budget FPS,. The graphics are very neon pastel Eighties, as is the soundtrack, and the whole thing has a “Miami Vice” feel despite being so superficially simple.

Definitely has a strong learning curve, however. You will die a lot at first before you adapt to this new sort of game,.

Personally, I am loving it, despite dying a lot. The adrenaline factor is high, an the whole thing is very slick and well produced. I know I will be playing it more.

A grade recommend, especially for those of us who remember the Eighties.

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I’ll do the others tomorrow,.

Dunno what’s with me today. I feel depressed and alienated and very, very tired. All I really want to do is sleep. Dealing with reality on even the most basic of levels seems like an impossible trial and I feel dark and dry and haunted.

I am worried I may be coming down with something.

OF course, it could just be that the chemical miasma of depression is particularly thick and pungent at the moment. When you are mentally ill, you can feel absolutely terrible without the intercession of a virus, bacteria, or microbe.

Gah. I feel like crawling into a dark hole forever.

And FRED is just a couple hours away. I might not make it. I feel like I am being slowly squashed flat by a giant’s boot. I feel edgy and twitchy and paranoid.

And I would hate to miss FRED. Not only would it mean missing a fun time eating and hanging out with friends, but it would probably also involve my missing my weekly shopping trip to the Sav-On and that always sucks big time by causing all kinds of deficiencies and expenses throughout the following week.

S I am going to try like hell to go, even thought I really, really, REALLY do not feel like it.

The only alternative I see is to skip FRED itself but ask Joe or Felicity to pick me up when it is done, and get as much sleep as I can while it is going on, hoping to somehow catch up before FRED is over.

It would be a bit of an imposition on whoever pciks me up and takes me shopping, but at least I would get my stuff and get to hang out with Joe and Felicity.

Alternately, I could order my groceries online. I have enough money on the card to cover it, and while it would mean spending an extra $7-$10 on the delivery fee, that would still be cheaper than what I would have paid to eat at FRED.

And I wouldn’t have to ask anything of anyone.

Yeah. That sounds likely. Heck, maybe I will even give Instacart another try. Sure,they won’t take my credit card (grr) but maybe they will take cash.

That would be nice. That way, I could get some of those amazing Real Canadian Superstore prices and a few of the products they stock that Sav-On does not.

Nope. Just looked it up. No cash option. Dang.

Guess I will be ordering from Sav-On then. Maybe. Who knows, maybe I will start feeling better in the next hour or so and the whole thing will be moot.

But thank you, dear reader, for letting me take up your time as I slowly talk my way around to a solution.

Like I always say, without you nice people, none of this could happen. I couldn’t write this blog without people to read it. It’s just how I am built.

So thank you, dear readers. I love you all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling fairly anxious because of a phone call I got today.

It was from my bank. Vancity. A nice lady told me that Medicins Sans Frontiers, aka Doctors Without Borders, was taking $20/month from my bank account. I then get charged $5 for an overdraft fee, then if I didn’t cover the overdraft within a few days, I get dinged for another $25 overdraft fee.

Because banks love charging poor people for being poor.

This is troubling news because :

1. I thought I had canceled my donation to MSF
2. I thought I had only ever authorized a payment to MSF via my credit card, not my regular everyday bank account
3. I thought my payment was $10/month, not $20/month
4. I thought I tended to have an overdraft to cover when I cash my monthly check because student loan payments were being taken out, not MSF payments
5. The amount of overdraft I pay each month varies, and the explanation I got this morning would result in the same charge over and over

The plot thickens. I just looked up my account online. There are no monthly payments schedule and MSF is not listed as a payee.

Where the hell has my money been going?? And can I get it back?

So now I have a host of mysteries to solve. like :

1. The nice lady on the phone said the payment was from MSF but I don’t see a scheduled payment to them listed under preauthorized payments, yet…
2. …I check the account history, and there’s a preauthorized payment to MSF for $20
3. I checked the entire last year and this is the first time MSF has charged me, so
4. Where the heck has that monthly overdraft been going??

Because there are no payments listed for the entire previous year. Yet every time I cash my check, there’s an overdraft I have to cover.

This makes no frigging sense.

Have I been scammed all this time? IF so, by whom? My bank? MSF? A third party?

When I go to cash my check next Thursday, I am going to ask some frigging questions.

Oh, one more thing : I know that money is going to pay down my student loan because once a year, for tax purposes, I get a statement showing how much I have paid.

Over the years, I have knocked it down by around $1000.

Yet those transactions don’t appear on my transaction history.

I even checked the history on my reloadable Visa, just in case, and nope, no payments to student loans there either.

The whole thing is complicated and mysterious and confounding and because it involves my money, I am now very anxious and perturbed.

I will take a break from trying to figure things out now, but one way or another. I have to figure out WTF is going on.

Especially because there’s a possibility someone owes me some money back.

Not a huge possibility. The problem might be that online banking does not show all forms of transaction. Which would be stupid.

But at the very least, I might stop having to pay a $20 to $50 overdraft every month.

That would freaking rock.

More after the break.

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Why Their Earlier Stuff Was Better

Here’s why i think your favourite artist – be it a musician, a comedian, a writer, a visual artist, or any other kind of reator – was good for a while but then started to suck.

It all comes down to success. But not exactly in the way people think it does.

It’s not just that success gives people swelled egos and thus distances them from their fans and it’s not just that success gives people access to all kinds of vices that is regular folks can’t afford either.

It’s not even just the lure of “life in the fast lane” either.

In addition to all that, there’s other, less obvious factors, like :

1. Temptation. It’s not just the life in the fast lane stuff that can kill an artist’s output. It’s that literally anything they want to do, they can. At the same time, they acquire a whole lot of people whose entire job is to do all the hard, boring, and unpleasant things in life for them. And art is hard, y’all. It takes effort, focus, self-discipline, giving of yourself, and grit to do it right and get it done. It’s so much easier and more fun to just be as hedonistic and self-centered as a child, which is what this new lifestyle has turned you into. This also leads to…
2. The diminution of the art itself. In a life like that, it’s very easy to go from a dedicated artist to someone who thinks of their actual art – the thing they are actually paid to do and that gets them all their money and fame and excess – as this annoying task you have to do now and then – so lame – and so they want to spend as little time and energy on it as possible. Also,
3. They lose their sense of objectivity. All day, they are surrounded by people who feed their ego and tell them everything they do is wonderful and they are god’s gift to art. These people are not lying, for the most part. Instead, they are idolaters who want you to be their idol and so they idolize you. Great for the ego, but terrible for your art because you lose all sense of whether what you are doing is actually any good. And the previous factors make you want to believe that you are so god damned talented that even the very halfassed, perfunctory, generic crap you are putting out now is manna from freaking heaven.

What all this means is that, if you are an artist concerned about the quality of the art that is your legacy, you have to face the stark reality that the biggest danger to your artistic output is the very success you are working so hard to achieve.

At least then, you can make an informed choice as to which is more important to you : living the spoiled toddler lifestyle, or leaving behind art you can be proud of.

I mean, go ahead and be spoiled and terrible – nobody will stop you.

But know that the people who know the most about the art – the fans – will lose all respect for you and mock you behind your back.

And your legacy will be crap. The last impression you will leave the world with will be of a hackneyed joke who ruined their own legacy for no good reason.

It’s up to you if you can live with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The technology-wrecking kind, not the kind that die in a microwave in a way that traumatizes you for life when you’re 8.

Right now, I am typing these words into a text document because the gremlins have taken my internet away. It’s been a little spotty lately, especially when it comes to the connect ion to the DNS, so I am not entirely surprised, but it’s still a serious pain in the ass.

Especially after struggling with Fallout New Vegas crashing all the time as I try to play through that New California mods I have mentioned before.

Everything was fine until this big huge battle with Vertibirds (futuristic helicopters) flying through the air and mortar fire exploding everywhere and both enemy and friendly soldiers by the score and bullets settling the score and all kinds of things that flash and smash that my my poor old computer crash.

The previous paragraph was brought to you by Doctor Seuss.

The thing is, my computer should be able to handle it fine. Fallout New Vegas is a very old game and my computer is still relatively young, so it should have no problem handling whatever the game dishes out without a hitch.

But when mods enter the equation, all bets are off. All the official content is designed to be playable on as many computers as possible, but mods are another kettle of fish entirely.

I might have to resort to uninstalling all my mods, then adding in just the ones I can’t live without along with New California, and see how that works out.

But I have to admit, as much as I am enjoying the content, I have been sorely tempted to just chuck the whole thing and start a second run-through of the original game instead.

I mean, I don’t need this kind of stress.

The plot continues to be intense, but this time I managed to avoid being captured by a bandit warlord and thrown down into a deep dark pit to fight two incredibly tough enemies just to prove my worth.

I did this by making sure all my friends from the Vault made it with me to the cabin, and therefore they were on hold to kill the fuck out of sub-boss that would have taken me to the bandit leader.

He was killed by my robot dog. Did I mention I have a robot dog? I have a robot dog.

Overall. The nerd path has been a lot more fun than the jock path. Being able to hack computers and fix things has been a hoot.

I mean, it got me a robot dog. Did I mention I have a robot dog? I have a robot dog.

And the thing is, I am still deadly as fudge with melee weapons. I can take an enemy soldier out with two quick stabs of my combat knife. Taking the nerd path in no way kept me from making the melee warrior I wanted to make.

It just added the ability to hack and fix and make stuff.

Plus I have a robot dog.

Did I mention the robot dog?

More after the break.

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Got a few minutes before The Next Thing.

I hope we end up going to Subway. I am craving it. I want something with a lot of meat and vegetables, and Subway does that kind of thing very well.

So does Chinese food,. but we rarely do Chinese.

If we hustled, we could probably go to the quite excellent food court at Richmond Center. I can sure as heck get Chinese there. In many different forms.

I wouldn’t say no to a burger but it’s not what I am in the mood for. McD’s or Wendy’s would be decent.

Right now, at this second, I would prefer McD’s. A Big Mac is calling my name.

Gee, I’ve been chatty lately. Where did all my deep dives into my depression and wide ranging philosophical meanderings go?

I think they went on vacation. They will be back eventually. But I need a holiday from all that stuff. I need time to surf the surface for a while.

I can’t spend all my time swimming in my own navel.

And these posts serve a valuable function too, because they mean I am taking my own life seriously and fighting against the feeling that I “do nothing”: all day and that nothing I do matter and everything is pointless.

That’s the depression talking, and by telling you wonderful people about my video game life, I am validating my own experiences and thereby making them more real.

And to be honest, I need all the reality I can get. I spend most of my waking hours in front of this damn computer of mine, playing games. No wonder I have such a desperately tenuous connection to reality.

I barely spend any time there. And that’s not a coincidence. I can’t handle reality.

Or maybe I could, if I gave myself the chance. One of the deadliest aspects of depression is that it locks you into beliefs that keep you from testing whether or not they are even true.

Like “I can’t handle reality”. Well, when was the last time I tried? It’s such an enormous, life-destroying generalization that it surely warrants further testing.

But if you believe it, you won’t test it. It’s a sure sign that it’s nothing based on reason or logic. If it was, it would be true regardless of testing. Testing could not harm it.

But the real sick truth is that depression makes you want it to be true. Because that’s easier than having to actually face reality ever.

Not better. Just easier.

In fact, a lot of depression is simply about avoiding reality. Burying your head in the sand and convincing yourself you are doing it because there’s nothing good in reality, as opposed to admitting that there’s tons of good in reality and you are just too scared to go out into the world and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to get it.

See, I told you it would all be back before long!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The necrosis of neurosis has start nibbling away at the good feelings from last night’s world premiere of me doing standup.

And you know what? Let it. IDGAF. I won’t give it energy by opposing it. It can burrow away at last night’s performance, breaking it down and judging it and tearing it apart, and I won’t do a single thing to stop it.

But I won’t pay attention to it. That would only feed it. It can labour away in my subconscious mind like a good little cognitive employee while I sit back and relax like a good boss, only interfering when executive decisions are needed.

I will go up again next week. That’s a settled issue. Until then, I will only devote as much energy and attention to it as I can spare without it becoming a whole “thing”.

Basically, I am going to coast along on my natural talent, only this time I am totally doing it on purpose.

Makes for a refreshing change.

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Had therapy today. Not a great session. I was so focused on telling him all about my standup comedy debut that I forgot to do ,my half of the staying focused on actual emotions and expressing them,. so I ended up just talking for the most part.

It’s so damned hard to tell the difference, especially in the moment. If I am sitting there talking with my therapist about emotions, it seems a lot like therapy.

But it might not be. It might take the form of therapy but the content is missing because I am not really expressing anything. It’s all too cold and detached and cerebral to be doing me any real good.

I need help exiting the intellectual mode so I can express my real feelings and get them off my proverbial chest.

The problem, ironically, is that I am a pretty spellbinding raconteur. I can keep my therapist fascinated without even half-trying, and so to that extent it is up to me to keep things “real” and emotionally meaningful.

I don’t want that kind of responsibility. I wish I lived in a world where I could simply relax and be myself in therapy and trust the therapist to keep things on point.

But I can be quite overwhelming, and I know it. Like a tidal wave of charm, intellect, intensity, and projecting empathy, and all done in a sweet and harmless way that is a lot for people to take in.

And that’s me restraining myself. That’s me doing my best to not go farther or faster or beyond the people I am communicating with.

I can’t even imagine what I would be like if I didn’t hold back at all.

I would probably end up in an insane asylum or a jail, or one of those creepy places that is both at the same time.

I have come up with a phrase : EXPRESS EVERYTHING. It’s a starling and refreshing idea. Express everything that you are feeling all the time.

And that goes double for anything you have repressed in the past.

Is it possible? I don’t know. Probably not.

But it IS a goal worth pursuing.

I will ponder it further.

More after the break.

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Really sleepy for some reason today. I was having a devil of a time focusing when I wrote Part Un up there. My mind kept wandering off and I would have to semi-patiently reel it back in and make it do the work.

I’m doing a little better now. I still crave sleep and I was nodding off while trying to play some New Vegas, which is why I am eating half an hour early.

I figured I really had to eat before I slept and sleep was coming up fast so I had better eat and finish the day’s blogging right away.

That way, I can sleep all night if I need to.

Speaking of New Vegas, this New California mod really is like an entirely new game. It even has its own loading and title screens, as well as two different character creation intros depending on if you choose “the path of the warrior” or “the path of the scientist”., totally new story intro, a custom Vault to start in, the works.

But it’s also super depressing. You start off in a nice cozy Vault, but it then gets attacked by a fascist faction of brainwashed youths lead by their Coach, then if that was not bad enough the leader of the vault is so freaked out by the carnage and chaos that he sets off the self-destruct mechanism, so then you have to run like hell to get out before the whole place blows up, then the whole place blows up, then the whole places blows up, then you have to get your ass to this cabin in the woods, then just when you think you are safe this bandit warlord shows up and kidnaps you, drags you underground, then throws you down a deep dark pit where you have to defeat both a giant super mutant behemoth and some invisible motherfucker with a gun.

Oh, and they took all your weapons away. So you have to do this with whatever your happen to find lying around.

It truly sucks. So much so that I started over against. I was a jock the first time, with high Strength and Endurance and Melee Weapons skill, and that’s when I dealt with all the crap I described above.

I hope the game is a little more gentle for my nerd. Either that, or that the nerdy things my jock could not do, like hack computers, help a LOT.

Otherwise, I will be tempted to just say “fuck it”, uninstall the damned thing, and start a new game of regular New Vegas instead.

New California is an extremely impressive achievement. In all ways it is like an entire game unto itself. The amount of work must have been staggering, but what is more impressive is the high level of professionalism.

It all looks and feels like the regular game, and that’s an intangible most large mods miss. And all for free.

But it’s just so god damned bleak.

Hopefully being a nerd is easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well this is it. I’m going to do it.

Tonight, when I go to the open mic with Felicity, I am going to get up and perform.

Needless to say, I am freaking out over it. Right now it’s at medium intensity but I am sure that was the time approaches, it will get much, much worse.

And I don’t fucking care.

Let it come. Bring it. I will go on no matter what. I am determined to lose my standup comedy virginity tonight, and so all the anxiety in the world doesn’t matter.

And that means my performance doesn’t matter either. I might just stand there in a stupor like a drooling idiot while soiling myself. Doesn’t matter.

I just want to get it over with. After that, I can start refining the process. Right now, the whole deal is to just get that shit done.

And really, I have no reason to fear. Many people have told me I am a very funny dude. I know I have the talent, the presence, the wit, the charm, and the skill to pull it off.

So it’s just a matter of actually doing it.

I will fill you in on how it goes tomorrow, or maybe later tonight.

---

Beat Fallout New Vegas this morning. Got the “independent New Vegas” ending because in the end, I sided with Yes Man.

Not that I was happy about that. I had intended to back the NCR the whole way but somehow ended up allying with Yes Man and turning on the NCR at the last minute and taking over Hoover Dam for myself instead.

It’s darkly funny how naive I remain in these games. Time and time again, I try to avoid picking a side and instead go as far as I possibly can and then I am thrown into deep conflict when the game forces me to choose.

Can’t we all just get along?

I’m going to start a second playthrough. There’s so much to do in the game that it would be crazy to only go through it once.

This time, I am going to try being a melee fighter again. It’s stabby time! I am going to install a few mods that enhance melee combat with more weapons and melee related perks and so forth and so on first, though.

Plus I downloaded a massive mod called New California that is practically a game unto itself, according to the hype.

So I got lots to keep me busy.

And when I am through with Fallout New Vegas, there’s the previous game, Fallout 3, for me to dive deep into.

And when I am done with that, I plan on going back to Fallout 4 because while I have played through the whole game PLUS all the DLC, I have never really modded it much, and I am sure there are tons of mods for it, too.

There’s DLC for New Vegas. Quite a bit of it, actually. I could get it all for around $21 CDN, which I could afford.

But for some reason, I don’t feel like it.

More after the break.

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Well, it’s official. I have now done standup.

And it felt so very, very good.

Really really good.

In fact, it didn’t just feel good, it felt right. Like for once, I was in the right place at the right time doing what I was supposed to be doing.

And I loved every minute of it. The whole time I was up, I had this warm glowy feeling, and the tension dropped off me like raindrops, and I felt amazing.

Needless to say, I want more. I will be going back up next week and the week after because I loved my time up there and I need another fix.

But I will continue to take it easy. The danger now is that I will charge into writing tons of jokes with great enthusiasm and end up getting tangled up in the minutiae of the process and bogged down with self-doubt and worry and the next thing you know, I am out of gas in the middle of nowhere and hopelessly loss.

So I am not going to sweat it. If jokes come to me – and they will, because without quite realizing it, I have been writing jokes in my head for decades, plus of course I will come up with new ones – I will write them down but otherwise I am not going to worry about the next show because that’s just the inroad my overweaning superego needs to run me ragged with stress and anxiety until I have to stop.

Fuck that noise. I will do this my own way, a way that would seem to others to be the worst possible way to go about anything, but it’s what works for me.

For example, before tonight’s set, I borrowed some paper and pencil and wrote down a list of jokes in bullet point form. Just a few words to remind me of the joke.

The normal, sane, organized, focused, purposeful thing to do right now would be to type those jokes into this blog in order to save them.

But I'[m not going to do that. Right now, my jokes exist only on that piece of paper and I am fine with that. Maybe the piece of paper will get lost of destroyed. Whatever.

What matters is keeping my hysterical (crazy) mind from fucking with my hysterical (funny) jokes and turning this whole thing into a frantic clusterfuck of anxiety ending in a swan dive into self-defeat and a resulting depression deeper enough to drive a truck into with room to spare.

Until next week, I will go about my life as usual, and let whatever feels natural and relaxed happen, but at no point will I let the demon Pressure and all its flunkies and retainers latch on to me.

I would rather stay loose and fail than let Peessure flail me into a very costly and ultimately counterproductive form of success.

Besides, pressure and self-flagellation have never worked for me anyhow.

I always do best when I am relaxed and loose and confident.

And that is how I shall remain.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s tackle my delusion that there is no place in the world where I belong.

I started out life unwanted. As patient readers know, I was unplanned.

Very unplanned. I beat my mother’s tubal ligation to be here. She really thought she wasn’t fertile any more, and boy did I prove her wrong.

And so from the very first, I felt like I didn’t fit in even within my own family. For my entire life, there’s been my parents, my siblings, and then little old me on an island all alone.

No wonder I never really learned to connect with others. I didn’t even connect with my own family in many ways.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I connected with my mother when I was very young. I think that’s the only reason I did not turn out to be totally autistic or at least very Aspie.

When I was an itty bitty kid, my mother would read to me at night before bed, which I absolutely loved. The Narnia Chronicles, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking glass, and Huckleberry Finn.

With my mother doing different voices for the characters and everything. It was magic.

Plus, we would sit at the kitchen table and she would play guitar and we would sing.

Then she went back to work.

Oh right, the point.

Apart from those early memories, I had no real place in the world, even in my own family. I had a babysitter, which was also good and probably the other half of the reason I did not end up with more than one tentative toe on the autism spectrum.

I didn’t fit in at school either. Never learned to connect with my other students or make friends. I had opportunities to make friends but it never worked out. Usually I was simply unable to relate to the other kid and defaulted to keeping my own autonomy.

Too bad. Might have learned something if I had stuck it out. I tried to get along with the people who tried to befriend me but they could tell that part of me wanted to get out of the situation as soon as possible because part of me was freaking out.

So I guess I was going into those situations already pretty damaged. If I had been a more stable and confident kid, I would have adapted. Rolled with the punches while I tried to figure shit out.

But there was all that anxiety getting in the way. As usual.

Makes me wonder whether a more active anti-anxiety medication, like Xanax and such, would do me a lot of good if I used it right before a potentially anxiety-inducing situation.

Something that would block my anxiety enough that I could connect with and relate to people and get myself some much needed positive human interaction.

I will ask my therapist about it when I see him this Thursday. In theory, it could open the door to some very therapeutic situations.

Or at the very least, help me have a good time now and then.

More after the break.

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I’ve sort of stayed on topic. More than usual, at least.

What I have been trying and failing to get to is that I have never felt like there was a place for me in this world. I’ve felt that no matter where I go, I will not fit in, and that it’s better to just stay by myself because, as it turns out, being alone is a million times better than being with others and feeling alone.

VFS reinforced this feeling. I thought that maybe I would fit in with other creative type people who wanted to work in TV, but no, not only did I still have very little in common with my fellow sentient primates, but there was also a generation gap as well.

So nope. Didn’t fit in there, either. Just like everywhere else.

I’m basically a species of one, or at least that’s how it feels a lot of the time. I understand completely why some people in my position come to the conclusion that they are something other than human on the inside.

After all, it’s far better to be a fully functional alien, or angel, or wizard, or anthro fox, or whatever else on the inside than to be what you really are, which is a broken human.

I have no such beliefs to support my feelings of otherness (for example, I don’t feel like I am “really” Fruvous the Moxy Foxy on the inside) and so I am fully aware that all I really am is a fucked up human who did not get any of the right emotional nutrients in my formative years and hence grew up stunted and malformed on the inside.

Like one of those kids rescued from a horribly neglectful and abusive home environment who are 8 but look like they are 5 due to malnutrition.

Except for them, a lot of the damage can be reversed via proper nutrition and good caretaking, and I have no idea what it would take for me.

Probably a lot of things you can’t get as an adult male, I would imagine.

The question remains : is there a place for me in the world? I said it was a delusion when I started today’s entry, but now I am not so sure.

I’m not just weird, I’m a weird kind of weird. It could be that no matter where I went, I would feel out of place, because the fault is not in the world but within myself.

At the very least, it would take some very strong, solid, and reliable positive emotional input sustained over a long period of time. A kind of intensive therapy for the soul.

It would have to go on strong and long in order to melt through the layers of snow and ice of many winters in order finally melt my frozen fragile heart.

Then I might be able to finally get the socialization I needed so badly and never got when I was of kindergarten age.

Because I never went to kindergarten.

And it turns out that;s kind of a big deal.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been playing Fallout New Vegas a ton lately.

And by that, I mean I spend most of my waking hours playing it. The series is just that good. I can play for hours and hours and not get bored with it or tired of playing.

It’s exactly my kind of game – open world full of quests and plot and things to discover, with great writing, voice acting, game play, and graphics.

Plus a pretty huge modding community. Not as big as Skyrim, of course, but still more than enough to keep me busy looking for things to make playing the game more fun.

Like I have said before, a long time ago, the best games for me are the ones you can both play and play with via modding.

Technically, I am on my second character. I first started the game with a melee combat based character instead of my usual deadly sharpshooter because :

a. slicing up mutants and bandits with a sword like a post-apocalyptic Conan the Barbarian is fun, and
b. I have been trying to break old patterns and start new ones lately.

That second bit is real hard. But worth doing.

And I made it all the way to New Vegas with that character, but the game just doesn’t have very many melee weapons and the melee combat is ultimately not as fun as blasting people’s heads off in various fun and entertaining ways, so I started over with my usual sniper type character and have gone a long way with him.

And wow, is there a lot of content. I have done so many quests! I’ve killed my way through hordes of bandits who call themselves The Fiends to kill their leader and thus eliminate them as an active threat to civilization, fought flocks of extremely dangerous poisonous mutant butterflies the size of pup tents, talked various colorful characters into becoming specialist sex workers for one of the casinos, rescued a scientist from an underground lab where the plants had gone crazy, and helped a group of missionary types set up a reliable supply line for medicine and food in return for helping a casino lord make his own booze.

And all with the help of my trusty companions, Veronica the nerd girl with the deadly pneumatic fist, and Rex, the cyborg dog.

Is it any wonder that I prefer to spend time in that world instead of the real one?

I have also had some fun with the sexytimes kind of mods. Ultimately, as fun as they are, once the novelty wears off I get tired of them pretty quickly, but even then, it’s still fun to be able to get humpy with a sexy character now and then.

It’s more about possibilities than activities. Mostly I just play the actual game, but knowing I can get my sexy on when I feel like it really adds to the overall enjoyment.

Plus, unlike the real world, I can have whatever kind of sex I want with no consequences and no limitations.

It’s the world as it should be, in my honest opinion. No more mindless taboos and persecution of sexual minorities.

We will get there some day. Hopefully when I am still alive.

More after the break.

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The problem being a sharpshooter…

…is that you are kind of helpless without a gun.

So in the game (Fallout New Vegas, for those with very short memories), I am on a mission to stop a bunch of elitist murderous cannibals from…. well, being elitist murdering cannibals, more or less.

There’s this ultra swank casino called the Ultra Luxe and they are very much a “all the best things for only the best people” kind of place. Really plutocratic and “exclusive”.

I hate that word in that context. It basically means “the main draw of this thing is that we exclude almost everybody, thereby making you feel extra special if you actually get in. ”

The place is very nice, though, especially compared to how crappy and run down and shitty looking everything else in the game is. Very tasteful, stylish, and restrained.

If only the people in charge weren’t awful. I have nothing against wanting to be in refined and tasteful surroundings where everything is pleasing to the senses, including one’s sense of aesthetics.

In fact, I aspire to that lifestyle myself.

But my senses include a very strong dose of empathy, so even if I was rich I would not be able to tolerate being around people with such ugly and repulsive attitudes.

Anyhow, like all the casinos on the Strip, they take your guns at the door. And that was fine until I reached a point in the plot where the informant gets shot (poor guy…. tried to save him but his death was, alas, scripted) and then the assassin turns his gun on me.

Getting rid of the witness, I assume.

And the thing is, while I am pretty helpless without my guns (and deadly AF with them), I still have my very good armor on. So the assassin’s gun does very little damage to him and I can do very little damage back.

So there I am, flailing away with my puny fists while he very slowly shoots me to death.

This was intolerable. I mean sure, I would have won eventually. seeing as I can use items to heal myself and he can’t, but it would have taken forever

So I tried a bunch of things, like using some of my store of drugs to pump myself up (nope, damage still pathetic) and trying to lure him outside, where I would have my guns and could blow his fucking brains out in a number of highly satisfying ways. Nope.

Then it finally occurred to me to wonder where my companions, who are both deadly hand to hand combatants, had gone.

I found them, brought them back to the Ultra Luxe with me, triggered the confrontation, and they made short work of the assassin who had bedelived me for much, much longer than I would like to admit.

Made me wish I had stuck with my original melee based character. Even naked, he would have taken that mofo down in seconds.

The perils of specialization, I suppose.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Trigger warning : anus and poop talk.

So I am nearly asleep when I get the vague feeling something unusual is happening in, on, and/or near my asshole.

It feels weirdly warm back there, and it itches and/or stings a little.

So I sleepily reach back there to give the itch a rub and feel something wet. I pull my finger back and open my eyes and lo an behold, poop.

I grab a Kleenex and clean off my finger, then explore further, and there is a lot more. I end up needed around ten more Kleenexes (Kleenices?) to get enough of it that I feel secure enough to go to the bathroom to get the rest in a more normal fashion.

I end up having a proper shit in the toilet, and it burns and aches a little bit, and like the rest of it with the Kleenex, it’s very soft.

It occurs to me that I am very, very grateful that I sleep on my front. Better to clean my butthole than my bed.

Then again, sleeping on my front might have contributed to the incident. All that pressure on my delicate digestive tract.

Needless to say, I am pretty worried about this incident and really hope it was a one time only thing.

I would hate to add night time incontinence to my list of ailments. The only cure for that would be to sleep in an adult diaper and my lord, I have so precious little dignity in my life that I don’t think I could take a loss like that.

Luckily, I am fairly sure it was brought on by having far too much of my beloved artificial cheez flavoured products like Cheetos lately coupled with some leftover (free) pizza.

My beloved cheez has been known to irritate my system in the past, and coupled with some Italian sausage and pineapple pizza, must have proved too much for my poor delicate digestion to bear.

So I am not too worried about a repeat incident. Not yet anyway. I will avoid all cheez (and cheese) for the time being and give my system a chance to calm down, and hopefully be able to put the whole thing behind me (so to speak) and file the memory away under “minor health weirdness” and forget all about it.

I will remain alert, though. I will pay close attention to how my innards are feeling for the next little while, and try to stick to soothing, bland, low-impact foods until I can be sure the coast is clear.

Anything that violates our boundaries on such a deep, private, and taboo level as pooping oneself is bound to be highly upsetting, and believe me, I am feeling rather scared and insecure right now.

If it happens again, I will have to go see my GP, with all the minor annoyances that entails, not to mention the humiliation of having to describe it all to him.

I pride myself in not being squeamish about things, especially when they are important, but even I have my limits and telling an authority figured I shat myself tests them.

More after the break.

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This one life

Another side effect of being as in tune with the myriad manifestations of life like I am, besides the crippling option paralysis, is the feeling that it is somehow unfair that we only get one life and one identity when there are so many other possibilities out there that we will never get to experience.

We only get to be this one human being. I am Michael John Bertrand and that’s it. It is all that I am and all that I will ever be.

And that just seems so… limiting.

And yes, I know how crazy that sounds. Most people do not think that way. Most people, in fact, aren’t even aware that they even are who they are. They can’t imagine being anyone else. Their identity is the core of all their perceptions and they can no more see it than you can see your glasses when you are wearing them.

Not oh so lucky people like me, though. I have always been adept at seeing things through the eyes of others and putting myself in their place and imagining what it would be like to be them. So I am keenly aware of all the sorts of people I am not, and part of me – the deeper part, the part that is the essential indivisible me – resents that.

That part of me wants to live a million lives. It wants to truly understand things from the point of view of other identities and add that understanding to its own greater wisdom.

It wants to see everything from every perspective. That’s the only way you can truly understand what is going on.

I sometimes think of it like reality is a play done in the round, and we are all looking at it from our own particular seat in the surrounding galleria.

Each of us sees the play from our own point of view, and it is easy to convince yourself that you really know what is going on in the play even though you are by no means seeing the whole thing.

But when you start wondering what it looks like from other people’s seats, you realize that all you are seeing is one thin slice of the action, and that if you want to really understand what is going on, you are going to have to get up and move around.

Thus, my life long obsession with gathering perspectives. I never feel like I understand something if I have only ever seen it from my particular point of view.

I always want to see things from other people’s POV, and if those aren’t available, I look at things from as many points of view as I can imagine.

This all happens subconsciously, of course. But it still happens.

And that is also how I compensate for the fact that I will only ever get one life and one identity and one pair of eyes to see through.

I use my mind and my empathy to see through as many pairs of eyes as I can.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.