I will get to the games in a moment, but…. woo hoo, free pizza!

Seems I have been such a loyal customer to Pizza Hut that I earned myslf not one but two free medium two topping pizzas.

Now there’s a reward program you can really sink your teeth into! *canned laughter*

So right now I am surfing a free pizza high. Right now, I have a free pizza on its way to me and all it cost me was the delivery charge.

Outstanding. Now, on with the games.

True Fear : Forsaken Souls Part 1. Dang, do I love this game.

It has everything I love about Dead Secret and just a little more. A little scarier, a little better thought out, a little more fun, a little more polished, and with slightly better writing.

So needless to say, the game has me hooked. I played through the first chapter with breathless enthusiasm, enjoying it every step of the way,.

One warning, though : some of the puzzles in this game are actual puzzles. Mostly hidden object scenes and the occasional very simply jigsaw puzzle to solve.

That was no issue for me. I love doing jigsaws on the computer (so much less messy than the real thing) and while I am not huge on the hidden object genre (or as I call it, the extremely cluttered room genre) of games, these follow a perfectly logical sequence and do not deluge you in visual clutter.

It’s strictly use the matches to melt the candle to get the key to open the box type stuff, and I am perfectly fine with that.

So consider this a rave review from yours truly. A+ recommend!

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Unloved. At first blush, I hated this game.

Why? Because it’s a multiplayer only game (urk) that takes place during a zombie apocalypse (ick) and I don’t like either of those things.

Multiplayer only games piss me off both because I am simply not a multiplayer kind of guy and because I think they have become a modern cop-out excuse for not bothering to make an actual game when you can just throw together an arena and skip all that plot, model building, world building, voice acting, and animation that go into making a real game in the real world.

It must be a very seductive business model. Hire some newbie game devs, pay them to throw together something over a long weekend, spend a couple of weeks in QA, then put it on Steam and let the profits from player purchases roll in.

But Unloved is not the stupid MOBA death arena I thought it would be. For one thing, it’s entirely coop, meaning I am not expected to kill the other players before they kill me.

Instead, it’s us versus the zombies, and that is way more compatible to my particular wavelength then any killsport setup.

Plus, there actually is leveling up, getting better weapons, and other RPG elements that give you a reason to keep fighting besides not dying.

So while the game is still not my cuppa, it’s not the mindless gibfest I thought it was.

For me, personally, it’s a C- at best. But lots of people are more interested in this sort of thing than I am, so I will give it a B- “worth checking out”.

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Outside the Bubble

This is one of those times when I am going to write about some half-formed thoughts in order to try to complete their birth.

I had a moment of insight emerge from the darkness of my subconscious mind, like a glimmer in the moonlight, recently.

There was not a lot for my conscious mind to grab on to, just a feeling that there was a connection between the way my mind sees a world full of possibilities at all times and how I tend to feel like I am lost and scared in the dark and how I turn inward in order to avoid seeing something I know is always there.

Actually, that last bit is new. It just came up. Seems pretty important.

SO what is thing thing I dare not face? What is this shadow of shadows, this darkness darker than darkness itself, this frozen phantom with the hollow, hungry eyes?

Damn I am good at images.

One possibility is that this shadow is… possibility. That it is the demon of option paralysis and represents the overwhelming horror and shock I feel when I try to deal with the infinite hallway of infinite doors that is the world to me.

Too many options. Too many possible errors. Cannot cope. Cannot decide. Makes me feel like I am going to die to even try.

And that’s definitely a big part of this shadow of mine.

But I know there is more to it. There is something else lurking there and as frightened as I am – and right now it feels like someone is slowly impaling my heart with an icicle and twisting it on the way in – I know that finding it and figuring out what it is will go a long way towards setting me free.

It could be the memory of being raped. That sounds plausible but it too does not feel like the whole story.

It feels like there is some concrete realization – something much more than merely a memory – that my mind is shielding me from with this whole deep freeze routine.

And that if I broke the shield and experienced the realization, it would blow my mind apart. My mind would shatter from the blow of something made of a pure and holy light, like a mirror shattered by the voice of an angel, and my own personal Armageddon would be unleashed.

Pretty dramatic, right?

Maybe that’s what it would take to bring on the Flood.

All turns quiet. I’ve been here before.

I feel a great and total silence fall within me. The bird in the air and the beasts in the forest and the all the fish in the see are all holding their breaths in anticipation of whatever might happen next.

But I don’t know what happens next. Not yet.

The ice groans. Cracks appear. Something deep and dark and ancient stirs below.

The sleeper tosses and turns, struggling to awaken. Something important is going on and it has to be there when it happens or something terrible will occur.

Swim hard, fast fish. Thrash in your net. Fight to stay alive. Fight to BE alive.

But poetry can only take you so far.

The rest, I suppose, is up to me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s my thoughts on the other 4 games I got recently :

Songbringer. This game is nuts.

In the best way possible. It’s an action RPG very much like the original Legend of Zelda games, but with the accelerator pedal nailed to the floor. It combines fantasy with science fiction in a gloriously flamboyant way, and the whole thing has the feel of a crazy dream you have after spending a night playing Zelda, smoking weed, and pounding back 5 hour energy drinks.

You play a hapless spaceman who crash lands on a very strange planet. The first thing you see is a cave very much like Zelda’s famous “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.”, and lo and behold, there’s a sword in this one too!

Your faithful AI drone buddy asks you not to touch it.

You totally touch it.

Zappy things happen, and then you have one sweetass vibrating sword.

It’s all marvelously trippy, and for the most part the game is amazing. But I have to say, for me it has a potential deal breaking flaw :

It’s all done in a pixel-art type graphics style that is very hard on my eyes.

It’s like the whole thing is deliberately blurry, and my eyes keep trying to bring it into focus but of course, that’s impossible.

It’s all very impressive and cool looking, and I can see what they were going for, but as much as I want to play it, the eyestrain factor makes it not worth it.

So I have to give it a B+ recommend. For you, it might be A+. The game seems quite amazingly awesome to me.

But not to my eyes.

The Free Ones. Holy crapsticks, is this ambitious.

In this game, you’ve been a slave in the mines ever since you and your family were captured by slavers when you were 12.

You have not seen the light of day since then.

Then one day, you see a bird in the mine.

A bird? Where did that come from?

You follow it out to the outside world, get an awesome grapnel type device, and begin your rope-slinging adventure.

It’s very much like being Spider-Man, or the hero of my fave NES game, Bionic Commando, so you can imagine how excited I was to give it a shot.

And the rope and grappling hook action is certainly a lot of fun, but the game consists pretty much exclusively of figuring out how to get from point A to point B via grappling system, and I am not sure that is enjoyable enough for me to keep playing,

Which is a pity. The story is very well executed and original, and the game both looks great and plays great.

But endless movement puzzles seems more tedious than fun to me.

Oh, and you WILL die a lot. Don’t worry…. you will not have to start back from the beginning, just from the last time you were on solid ground.

In summation : A B- recommend. If you love the main mechanic enough to be happy using it in creative ways to overcome obstacles, this is the game for you.

For me, though, that is not at all a sure thing.

More after the break.

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My thoughts on method

I will do the remaining 2 games tomorrow.

I have a troubled history with method as a concept and as a reality. Being a natural pragmatist, I have often looked down on method as something suitable only for people with narrow minds and no imagination who need a fixed method for doing things instead of tailoring the solution to the problem like all the cool kids like me are doing it.

“Method….” , as I have arrogantly declared in the past, “is crap. All that matters is results. ” And I have definitely looked down on people who are trapped in this school or that method or some other thing that keeps them from solving their problems because they are coming at it with entirely the wrong set of tools.

And I still believe that the best solutions come from my pragmatic, open-minded, and creative type thinking.

However, I recognize that not everyone can do it. My software does not run on other people’s hardware very well. And so while the opinions remain, the disdain is gone.

You do you, folks, and I’ll do me, and we will leave the dogma behind together.

And to be honest, for all my brouhaha, the truth is that I am not very good at doing things methodically. I have a lot of trouble translating someone else’s method into a set of instructions that I can understand and follow.

Turns out other people’s software doesn’t run well on my hardware either.

As a result, I have very little experience with doing things methodically. I have instead coasted along on my considerable intuitive intelligence and ability to grasp, analyze, sort, and retain information without the need for organization or methodology.

Which is great. Until I come across something beyond my capabilities. And then I am lost because I don’t know how else to do things.

That’s what tripped me up in the linguistic class from hell. My approach takes a certain amount of time and that’s not negotiable. As soon as the information starting coming in faster than that, I was totally lost, and had no idea how to find my way back.

A less gifted person would have been doing things methodically all along and so had numerous tried and true ways of catching up if they fall behind.

But mega genius me was fucked.

Kinda ironic, innit.

I am fairly certain I could learn to follow methods if I had a patient teacher and if I could keep my frustrations with how slow it all is in check.

I just have to remember to be humble enough to see that my way is not the only way and that there are people who can do things far beyond my abilities precisely because their way of doing things make it work for them.

And I could learn a lot from those “boring” people.

I just have to slow down long enough to listen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m starting to think that the secret to unlocking my true potential is to simply get used to fucking up on a regular basis.

The latest error : I was at the pharmacist to get my psych meds (Wllburtrin, Paxil, and Mirtazapine for sleep) and I had just run out of Metformin, so I figured it must be time for my diabetes meds to be refilled too.

My pharmacist told me that I had last gotten those filled in late September and therefore were not due until December.

Curious. I assumed I must have misplaced a bottle back home, so when I got home I looked for it….. and found a bag with like every med I take in it.

Only then did I remember getting these things refilled and sticking the bag under my desk because I didn’t need the refilled just yet.

And then promptly forgot all about that, leading to today’s debacle.

But the worst is yet to come. Because in addition to all my usual non-psych meds, there was Ramipril, a blood pressure medication, which I was supposed to be taking all this time but got forgotten with everything else in the beg.

And I am so. fucking. sick of this shit.

I try so hard not to make these kinds of mistakes and they just keep happening anyway. Life is just going to keep stomping on my head this way and there is not a goddamned thing I can do about it because I am absentminded to a near-disability degree.

And it’s only getting worse.

My only avenue of escape is to just lie back and get used to it, I suppose. Adjust to the reality that no matter how hard I try, I can’t keep these mental errors from happening, so all I can do is adapt to them.

That would involve forgiving myself for them, and that… is a very tall order.

Self-forgiveness is a tough row to hoe for me. I have too much internalized anger for that. Inside me lies a very angry, very malicious, very dishonest and underhanded prosecutor that misses no opportunity to take out its (my) rage at myself.

I call it my overweaning superego, mostly because I like how it sounds. And until I get that son of a bitch under control, forgiving myself for things will be very hard to do.

Maybe I need to impeach him. That makes way too much sense.

He is certainly unfit for office. He lies, he cheats, he pretends to be other voices in my head, he steals my motivation, punishes non-crimes, and seethes with obvious malice and ill will. He almost never does his job correctly and when he does it’s a fluke.

He’s not a very happy person either. So honestly. the best thing for him and me would be if he was put out to pasture somewhere quiet where he can vent his horribl rage all he wants without hurting anybody, including me.

At the very least, he needs to be retrained and given a job with less responsibility, like say being a security guard to legit keep me safe, as opposed to now, when I am in far more danger from him than from any external threat.

Hmmm. Seems like a good idea. I will start to paperwork on it and we’ll see how it goes.

Of course, that means I need to find a replacement…..

More after the break.

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An embarrassment of riches

In the neatly symmetrical opposite of the previous time buying a bundle of games on the cheap, this time my problem isn’t that none of them are good…. it’s that they all are!

Not a clunker in the bunch. I would be lying is I said I liked them all equally, but they are all pretty interesting and pretty good.

Here’s some quick impressions of the first 3 of 7 :

Another World. No, not the soap opera. More’s the pity.

I mean, how would that even work?

No,. it’s a re-release of a sleeper hit from 1991 I knew as Out Of This World.

The game blew my mind way back then. There was nothing else even remotely like it in 1991. It was dramatic, it was cinematic, the animation was way beyond what other games had, it had a plot, brilliantly simple controls, and really made me feel like I was on an adventure.

Playing it again, I am not as impressed by the graphics,. but I am still thrilled by the smooth animation, unpredictable and original plot, and the whole magical exciting feel of the game.

There’s still nothing else quite like it. A+, man.

Dead Secret. My expectations for this game were extremely low.

And for good reason. The description said it was a first person horror game, and I have had absolutely no luck with those. The ones I have tried either have terrible graphics or a terrible interface or both, plus bad voice acting and even worse writing.

But god damn it, Dead Secret is good. Imagine that.

It hooked me right away and did not let go. The puzzles are exactly hard enough for me to feel like I have figured something out when I solve them, but not so hard that they make me quit out of frustration.

And it’s pretty damn scary. And I am not easy to scare. But the first person aspect really puts you in the scene and it’s scary as hell.

Another A+ recommend.

Sky Break. This game is odd.

But in a good way. In the game, the human empire is being ravaged by a plague and the cure may be found on a super dangerous planet.

You are part of a delegation that was sent to find the cure. Of course, your spaceship crashes and you have to make it on your own.

So far, I am enjoying this crazy trip. The world of it feels real, and the unique aspect of being able to resurrect fallen enemies in your service for a time appeals to me.

I haven’t played it enough to give it a real grade, but so far so good!

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I will do the other 4 tomorrow. Now I want to talk about my problem.

This is one of those problems that is good to have – too many good games to play!

As patient readers know, I have an option paralysis issue. I sometimes find it extremely hard to make decisions. I usually handle this by making sure I am not presented with a long list of options very often.

But now here I am with a whole bunch of good games to play, and only so much time, so now I have to pick and choose.

I am probably just going to go with my gut on this. Whatever games make me want to play them more will get played. The rest will get uninstalled and remain in my Steam Library until I feel like playing them again.

I find the prospect of deliberately choosing unreason like that quite thrilling. This is definitely a situation where reason just plain flat out can’t help. There is no strictly logical reason to play Game X over Game Y.

It’s entirely a matter of my own amusement.

And there’s nothing reasonable about that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s amazing how much I can just let go now.

The voices do all the work while I just watch the world go by. Every now and then I make an executive decision, gently correct an errant employee, or take the helm for long enough to get us through a tricky situation.

But for the most part, I just watch over my busy beavers and I could not be happier with this new arrangement.

It’s certainly not what this new drug, Klarien, was intended to do. Can you believe my doctors started it because my doctors wanted to make all my lovely little voice go away?

I’ve only been on the new drug for two weeks, and already I can’t imagine life without it.

Everything used to be so chaotic! Voices hounding me all the time, hounding me, screaming in my ears, goading me into doing awful things, and never a moment’s peace where I could simply relax and be myself.

With Klarien’s help, I have been able to not only shut them up, I have been able to set them to work and make them obey my well and, well, deal with life for me.

I dare Klarien to put THAT in their commercials with the good-looking people and the weirdly indirect language about people “not feeling or acting like themselves”.

“Hello, my name is Jackquelin Hide, and my head is full of cheese and lice, and sometimes the lice sing to me. Show tunes, mostly. Most people would consider this a problem, and so did I…. until I started taking Klarien. Now, the cheese smells like a fresh meadow and the lice sing surprisingly good financial advice. Thanks, Klarien!”

Then in a deep male voice : “Ask whichever goblin seems most like your doctor if Klarien is right for you, whoever THAT is. ”

I’d buy the fuck out of that. Or at least, I’d think I did.

---

Hmmm. Just kind of hit a brick wall there. No idea where to go next with the story.

Originally, I was going to talk about each individual voice like they were separate people as per multiple personalities, but for some reason I don’t want to do that now.

And there is no replacement idea waiting in the wings to activate.

Feeling fairly tired at the moment. That might be a factor in this sudden creative drought. Perhaps I will return to this narrative later, when I have had more sleep.

Don’t hold your breath, though. I almost never go back to things. Once I stop and detach from it, I move on and never want to see it again.

So down the toilet it goes. Flush and repeat.

It’s not the smart way to be and it’s not the way I want to be. It’s just what I am stuck with as an artist.

I suppose the bright side is that I always have lots of energy for lots of new ideas.

And I do follow them all the way till they are done a lot of the time.

Just not this time.

More after the break.

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Those oh so sour grapes

While watching a thing where incels tell their story and it got me to thinking about bitterness and the lies we tell ourselves so that we feel better.

Hence the sour grapes. The fox in the fable tells himself those grapes he couldn’t quite get were probably sour anyway. In other words, he told himself they had gone bad.

That is the basic pattern of what I am talking about. Deciding the things you want but think you can’t have are actually bad and not worth having, thus soothing your frustration at not being able to have it and giving yourself permission to stop trying,

Myself, I am, for better and for worse, too realistic for that. I know that if I want something but can’t have it, it has no impact whatsoever on the nature of the thing.

If it was worth having before I knew I couldn’t have it, it’s still worth having aftertwards. Nothing has changed except my emotions.

In other words, I lack the ability to adjust my view of reality to better suit my emotional needs and desires.

On the whole, that’s probably a bad thing. I think those subtle and not so subtle reality adjustments go a long way toward making living life bearable, and that without that capacity, one ends up an emotional train wreck like myself.

And sure, I might see reality more clearly and sharply and precisely than others. This has, at times, given me the seer’s advantage in situations.

But big fucking deal. If the price I pay for that vaunted clarity is my happiness then the price is way too fucking high.

Right about now, I could use some emotional buffering to make the world seem not so harsh and cold and hostile.

But I am pretty sure it’s far too late to install it. I will have to keep processing things my way until I come up with some other way to make life easier.

Anyhow, back to sour grapes. The point I wanted to make is that the fox in the fable feels better about the grapes when he decides they were probably sour, but at what cost to his future happiness?

What if he decides all grapes are probably sour, and stops even trying to get them? Then he cuts himself off from all possible future happiness.

Happiness as represented by grapes, that is. Don’t get hung up on the metaphor.

I know a lot of people who are trapped in misery by their own sour grapes. Men are pigs who only care about sex, women are harpies who only want to use men for their own selfish gains, people who go to college just end up working at McDonald’s, the big cities are filled with crime and drugs, success is all about who you know and you have too much pride to be a suckup, and so forth and so on.

People build these prisons for themselves for perfectly valid emotional reasons. But I don’t think most people realize that they are losing far more than they are gaining.

And that makes me sad.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s my short term goal.

Dare to dream, that’s my motto.

Probably should be “dare to act”. Dreaming big is easy. I do it all the time. Imagination (and its cooler older brother, “vision”), has never been my problem.

The will to act, that’s my problem. Problem is, when you are really good at dreaming, you start to prefer dreams to reality.

Dreams are always exactly what you imagine them to be. They can’t fail you, disappoint you, or surprise you with unforeseen complications.

Reality, on the other hand, is hard. It requires so much effort and it’s complicated and it’s scary and it’s loud. Worst of all, it does its best to pull you out of the secret garden of your mind and make you deal with things.

So you deal with the absolute minimum amount of reality you can, and maximize the time you spend in your safe and cozy world of dreams and the mind.

By, say, playing video games all day.

I know I have a lot to give the world. I know that I could do a lot of good in the world if I had the balls to get out there and kick butt.

But that deep and terrible sadness inside me keeps me locked in a cage I built a long time ago to protect me from the world.

I try to imagine actually engaging with the world, for real and not just in theory, and the sadness wells up in me and I just fall apart inside.

In many ways, it is worse than the fear. The fear, at least, reminds me that I am alive. The sadness, on the other hand, feels like the opposite of life.

Not death, exactly. Even death has a certain vitality to it.

More like… the opposite of living.

And the only way I know of to do with this sadness is to turn away from the world and do what little I can do while it slowly drains away.

And when it’s gone, I feel empty and hollow.

And once more, the lesson is reinforced : don’t go anywhere near the edges of my tiny comfort zone. Doing so only makes things worse. I am better off staying in my lame little lane instead of drowning in my own icy cold tears.

I don’t exactly want to die.

But I don’t exactly want to live, either.

Or maybe my problem is that I want to skip the awkward and painful journey between my current level of woundedness and true mental health.

Or maybe that I find the fundamental truth of my situation – that I can do nothing to make myself better except keep going to therapy and writing on this blog – so fundamentally unacceptable that I would rather think that I am failing at life rather than face the fact that I am, in fact, doing all that I can and it’s not enough.

After all, you can’t fail if there was never chance to succeed.

More after the break.

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Where were we? Right, my inability to accept the fundamental truth of my situation.

I wish I could adopt a healthy, one day at a time kind of attitude. It seems to work for other people, and I admire it in them.

I mean, it’s not like having a head full of dreams and grand ambitions has ever done me any good anyway. In fact, it’s mostly caused me pain, both by giving me a world to escape to that is more attractive than real life, and by causing me to feel like a failure for failing to live up to my ginormous potential.

And there is always that nagging sense of what I “should” be doing with my life right now. If my life had gone as planned, I would have been a successful therapist with a thriving private practice by now, possibly with some research or hospital work as well.

The hospital work would be more likely. If I could help people with very serious diagnoses find a little island of sanity in the midst of their neurochemical chaos, that would justify my existence, as far as I am concerned.

Research work would be too clinical for me, I think.

Viewed that way, my dreams don’t seem particularly grandiose.

Of course, post-VFS, my dream was to be a writer in the writer’s room at a TV show, and that’s a lot more grandiose, but certainly not impossible given how impressed everyone was with my talents at VFS.

But somehow, being amazingly good at the actual job of writing for television wasn’t good enough to get them to actually recommend me for stuff, and that rejection crushed me in a way that I didn’t even comprehend at the time.

Everything went OK right after graduation. I was on UpWork, doing jobs, making money, building up a rep. Then I got the Uno writing gig, and that went fab for like 18 weeks, otherwise known as 90 episodes.

But then I fucked that over by asking for more money then asking for more money again like a week later.

Seems insane now. But then again, so am I.

And then I made the mistake of taking some “time off” between gigs, and that was the opportunity my depression needed to drag me all the way down again.

Then Skyrim happened, and everything got so much worse.

And so here I am, at the bottom of the very deep well of depression I fell into after that. I must have gotten hurt pretty damn bad in the fall, because that was many years ago now, and I still haven’t recovered fully.

Every day, though, I get a little stronger. I am not the person I was when I finally got rid of Skyrim. I am stronger, tougher, smarter, and above all, saner than I was then.

I’ve come a long way and there’s a long way to go. I know that no matter what, I will keep putting one foot in front of the other because one of my biggest talents is my ability to just keep going no matter what.

I will leave this dungeon of mine one day.

I will walk in the warmth and the light.

I will live free and healthy and strong.

And there will be more to my life than endless fucking video games.

To this, I swear.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s occurred to me that mayba I am going about this whole recovery thing all wrong.

My natural response to challenge is to attack it with a huge amount of mental force. I have lots to spare and so it is natural to me to simply turn my mighty analytical mind to the problem and, usually, totally destroy it.

But that does not work on everything. And that’s the problem. Because when it doesn’t work, I tend to give up.

A perfectly example is my experience with arts and crafts in school. I hated them. Why? Because I had a hard time doing them. Unlike all the more academic subjects like English or History, arts and crafts did not instantly yield to my ferocious intellectual assault, and often refused to do that like the intellectually privileged kid I was.

A normal kid with normal grades would have been forced to do it till they got it right. But between my intellectual gifts and my spectacular willful stubbornness, there was nobody to make me do them, so I never learned to persevere.

I resent a lot of the teachers I have had for what they never did for me – like stopping the bulling, for example.

But I also resent them for what they let me get away with. I’d just sit there refusing to do what everyone else felt they had to do, and got away with it because nobody could handle me at all.

And let me tell you something, you nice people you.

People who believe in and follow the rules hate people who break the rules and get away with it, like I did, with the white hot passion of a thousand suns.

No wonder I got picked on. I was, in a way, a successful criminal.

I have never, ever feared authority. Not even in the principal’s office. That might be the most middle class thing about me.

In a perfect world, there would have been someone in my life who could kick my ass. Someone who had the force of personality and intellect to force me to pay attention, follow the rules, and stop fucking around.

But there wasn’t, so I never learned to do that. Never in my entire childhood did I have to buckle down and work hard to overcome an obstacle, therefore I have no memories of having done that and the sense of triumph and mastery it brings to draw upon.

So I have been wimping out when things get tough for a very long time.

And it’s frustrating to try to imagine a way out of it. My powerful yet wimpy mind doesn’t want to go there. Intellectually, I know that there must be an infinite ocean of difficult challenges out there just waiting for me to tackle them full force and just keep banging away at them till I succeed.

But unless they come in video game form, I doubt I will be doing it any time soon.

More after the break.

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I suppose I need to stop being so tender and delicate with myself.

The question, as always, boils down to the question of fleeing or staying. We can heap all the extraneous complications on it we want. We can talk about childhoods and chemical imbalances and rotten luck all we want, but it’s still fundamentally about whether you stay in, or tap out.

I tap out. Most of the time, anyhow. In fact, my failure to endure is so complete that I tap out of the things I think might have to tap out of due to other things I also tap out of.

It’s the 3D chess of failure.

It follows the pathology of progressive phobias : First you are afraid of the thing itself upon encountering it. This fear response is so strong that it attaches not just to the thing itself but to other, related things and ideas. So then you encounter one of these precursors to the thing itself. That fear response is so strong that it then attaches to other things and ideas relating to the things and ideas relating to the thing itself.

And so forth and so on. If the pathology is particularly virulent, you can end up with someone with such a large network of phobias that they can’t do much of anything without triggering the whole damned thing.

That’s the position I am in. I know, intellectually, that what I am truly afraid of is socially awkward moments. I also know that these are not the big deal that my phobia makes them out to be and that a lot of what I feel when they happen has more to do with my past than anything present in the present.

And if that was it, my condition might be manageable. But of course, that’s not it. Radiating out from that fear is an enormous spiderweb of fear that stretches out to infinity in all directions, to the point where it limits the things I can do without triggering my fear to a very small set of long-established low-physical-stimulus high-effort-to-reward-ratio things that do a passably good job of seeming like life.

But they are not life. If they were, I wouldn’t be able to handle them. Life is bright and loud and scary. The only way to avoid the fear is to obey the phobia completely.

Failure to do so will throw me into utter panic.

I am well beyond the point where the fear is about the thing itself. What I am truly afraid of is my panic attacks.

When those are on the table, you don’t need anything else. They are punishment enough to keep me in line.

And I don’t know how one goes about fixing that. I wish I could just unplug the whole thing from the wall and be done with it.

Instead, all I can do is keep going to therapy, and hope that by doing so, I will one day pull all the shrapnel and toxins from my soul, and be free.

All I need is a little faith.

Yeah, about that….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I goofed.

Totally spaced on making the reservation for FRED yesterday. Didn’t realize it until Joe asked about it last night as I was on the way to bed.

And thank Dog he did! Otherwise I might have blanked on it till it was time to go.

Easy fix. Wait till they open then call up and make the reservation. And thanks to Julian, I was able to do it quite early.

See, I figured they were not a breakfast kind of place so I wasn’t going to call up till 10 am. But Julian looked it up and they actually open at 6:30 am every day.

So I called at around 8 am, made the reservation, everything’s cool.

In the time in between, I felt pretty horrible. Felt very stupid for having forgotten the one important thing I had to do.

I was able to keep it from turning into a whole depressive death spiral of self-loathing and agony, but it was still not a happy place to be.

And it set me to worrying anew that my condition is getting worse. I feel like it gets harder to think and remember and be awake and aware every day.

Probably losing brain cells every time I sleep.

And yet, I am as smart and talented as ever. And it doesn’t really interfere with playing video games too much. Not yet.

So my stupid lifestyle is largely intact. Yay.

But for how long? How long do I have before the fog in my head gets so thick and sticky that I can’t do much of anything? How long till I am near-catatonic, just laying in bed staring at nothing, floating through life like a little grey cloud on the horizon, not really here at all.

What a tragic waste that would be. And all completely avoidable…. were I a healthy man, with a healthy mind and a healthy spirit.

But I am not. The best that I can hope for most days is to just make it through the day without too much pain or fear. That’s why I play video games all the goddamned day – because I am too weak for much else.

So I drift helplessly towards doom. Soon I will meet my end exactly as I have dreamed it so many times : in a hospital bed, with tubes and wires everywhere, freaking out hard because of the tube down my throat and the mask over my face but unable to communicate it to anyone so I am stuck in utter torment till I finally, blessedly, die.

There has to be a way out. Some way to either vitalize myself so that I can take care of myself better, or get someone else’s help.

I’d need a lot of help. Someone who will stay on me until I do the things I should do in order to maximize my health. Someone who can tell me what those things are when I am too fogged up to think of them myself. Some willing to push and prod and harass and cajole me into not frigging dying.

Can’t imagine anyone is willing to do that for free, and I sure as fuck can’t pay them.

But there has to be a way.

I just have to think hard enough to find it.

More after the break.

---

Tried to jerk off. Got nowhere. Frustrated. Sigh.

I suppose, if I were a healthy fag, being this horny would drive me to go out looking for some cock. Either via an app like Grindr, or going to the baths, or somesuch.

I honestly can’t imagine living like that. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be able to just leave home in pursuit of the satisfaction of your needs and desires whenever you want. I can’ imagine leaving the home not being a huge deal for me.

Even if I had a lot of money, it would still be a big deal to go out. Sure, being able to afford to take cabs everywhere, or even to have my own car and driver, would make it easier, but in my mind, the difference between being nice and safe at nice safe predictable home will always be radically different from being out in the loud, overstimulating, unpredictable world.

Sad to imagine my still being a recluse with a million bucks in the bank, but realistic.

I’ll be going out to FRED tonight, and after FRED I will be going to Felicity’s parents’ place to hang out with her and Joe and watch videos, and in between those I will be doing my Sunday shopping at the Sav-on at Ironwood, and so I will be out of the apartment from around 7:45 pm to around 2:30 am.

This is only possible because I will be with my friends the whole time (plus a few others), I will be at places I have been before, and I will get everywhere by car.

Even with all that, doing FRED every other week is still the most stressful thing I do on a regular basis. It takes a lot of spoons for me to go do it.

Even though I know I will enjoy myself and be glad I did it. Somehow, that knowledge does not penetrate deep enough to change my emotions.

Mental illness is funny like that. It’s crazy.

I hope that if, someday, my financial circumstances improve drastically, that I will make myself keep going out every night until that becomes the new normal and I finally lose some of this petrified paralysis that keeps me homebound and frustrated.

The only real cure for the bad tapes that play in my head when I try to do stuff is to replace them with good tapes, and that means taking risks.

Surely, somewhere in the world there are good, kind, and very very patient and persistent people that could give me the powerful doses of positive human interaction it would take to overwrite all the negative and erroneous crap inside me.

No idea where I would find them, though. My negatives are extremely powerful. Not even my therapist can handle them, more’s the pity.

Guess I will just keep suffering alone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up from a small nap this afternoon in the midst of a bout of crushing depression.

Brushing is the best term for it. I really felt like something was crushing the life out of me. It redlined my depression in seconds. Maxed it out.

So there I was, not even fully awake and feeling like (don’t panic) killing myself. That’s how badly I wanted to get out of my situation. I felt like I was trapped under a heavy weight and death was my only way to escape.

So I hard serious suicidal ideation for the first time in over a decade. Usually, all I have is little blips where I feel that panicked urge to escape everything for one or two seconds and then my defenses kick in and shut that shit down and I am fine again.

Or at least, no worse than usual.

So I was not ready to face the intensity of it all. Overall, it was an extremely scary and unpleasant experience. I had to fight back the darkness with all I had even as it tried to tempt me with visions of all the bright shiny knives we have that could end my pain and other escape route type stuff.

It should be obvious by now that if I am here typing this for you, I did not harm myself. I fought my demons to a standstill then shoved them out of my mind.

So I won that battle, and it was an intense one, so I am confident in my ability to handle a rematch if necessary.

So don’t worry, my friends. I am not in danger of hurting myself. If it happens again, I will be ready for it, and kick its ass even harder than before.

But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about it.

I think it was triggered by my sleep apnea. I think I had a bout of very apnic sleep and woke up with a disastrously low blood oxygen level and possibly even some lung deflation, and that triggered one whopper of a panic attack.

As it should.

My sleep apnea is, as patient readers know, untreated. I told my doctor that CPAP hadn’t worked for me, and he shrugged and said “Well, that’s all that there is, so go try it again”, and that’s where it ended about a year ago.

Were I a more lively and vital person, I would have been driven by concern for my own safety to find some kind of solution for the problem by now, but I am not.

I am, instead, a feeble creature at heart, and often lack the will to act.

Must be all that oxygen deprivation in my sleep.

If only there was a way to treat that.

---

I am beginning to doubt my GP’s ability to treat me. I am seriously considering looking for another, one closer to this apartment.

Then again, if the problem is my own timidity, changing doctors will not help. The new one will take advantage of me to catch up on their schedule too.

Doctors aren’t trained to give the sort of gentle, patient support I need. And the system pays them per patient, so they are incentivized to cut corners. 

And I am very much a corner. 

I have been all my life. For as long as I can remember, people have been steamrolling over me because I lacked the will to stand up for myself and demand people reckon with me and people sense this and make the decision – not usually consciously – that the easiest thing is to just say whatever they need to say to get me to leave them alone and then move on to someone worth their attention. 

And I can’t fault their logic. That is definitely the easiest thing…. for them. 

For me, it is just another shattering blow to my delicate self.  There are no consequences for whoever crushed me, because all I do about it is crawl back to my hidey hole and quietly and unobtrusively bleed. 

Well, what else can a timid little animal do when they have been run over? 

And the driver of the car doesn’t even know – or care – that they hit me. 

 

---

I am not sure how to solve the problem I have with doctors.

I suppose I could go into each GP appointment with an advocate who is there to represent my interests when I cannot.

Or at least someone who can squeeze my hand and remind me not to fold because this is my health we are talking about here, and that shit is important.

It’s certainly worth fighting for.

And I know this, but that is not enough to give me the courage and determination to stand up for myself even when the doctor clearly just wants me to GFTO already.

It’s so much easier to slink on back to my dirty little warren and go back into the infinite holding pattern that I am pleased to call my life.

It’s my something, anyhow. And it’s sitting where a life would go if I had one.

Kind of like one of those tiny towns with a mayor that’s a dog.

With someone there to shore me up, I might be able to be the sort of firm, no-nonsense, efficiently self-interested person that I always wish I had been after a GP visit.

I picture Robert Picardo as the EMH of Voyager very smoothly and efficiently explaining my issues to my GP in his marvelously clipped and prissy manner.

And if my GP resists, pinning their ears back with his oh so very dry wit.

It’s a problem that cries out for a solution. Right now, by default, my life plan is to just keep going exactly like I am going until one of my health issues lands me in the hospital or otherwise gives me some kind of highly visible and demonstrable issue that does the talking for me like that infection I had.

That way, I don’t have to convince someone that I am worth their attention.

I just have to show up and point.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Was scrolling through my Steam library when I came upon a lil ol game called Fallout New Vegas, and realized I hadn’t played that one hardly at all, so I figured what the heck, and downloaded/installed it.

It’s a legendary game. Some consider it the best of the Fallout series, beating out Fallout 4, its successor. I love the franchise. Some of the best games out there.

Yet I remember getting it, downloading it, installing it, trying it, and not being all that impressed by it. Yet I can’t remember why.

And I still don’t know. Seems fine to me, to be honest, at least so far.

Well that’s not entirely true. There are some maddening deficiencies in the UI department. Having to open my Pip-Boy to do every damn thing is annoying AF.

I am used to being able to access things like my quests and the world map without a single keystroke. Having to press TAB to open the Pip-Boy then click around slows things down a fair bit.

But overall it seems pretty good.

It sure as hell opens with a bang.

I decided not to go immediately for my usual science and sharpshooting type character and be a melee specialist instead.

I’ve played them in Fallout 4 and while getting close enough to stab someone shooting at you with a gun can be damned tricky, it can also be a lot of fun.

And if that fails, I can always fall back to my tried n’ true Fixer character.

“He never said his name, but he sure cleaned up this town. First he killed all the bandits. Then he fixed the town water pump, added a scope to my grand-daddy’s hunting rifle, sewed pockets into my leather armor, and taught the grandkids about the physics of energy weapons!”

The idea of being a deadly gun-toting nerd will never cease to amuse me.

I also still have my second run-throughs of Borderlands The Pre-Sequel and Pillars of Eternity 2 going. Both games have surprisingly high replay value.

Plus there’s some bullshit games I got from a bundle I bought on Fanatical. None of them are what I would call winners.

But WTF, I paid 4 bucks for 5 games. So whatever.

Took forever for me to find a character to play for my second time playing Borderlands The Pre-Sequel. The problem was that I couldn’t find one with a special power I liked, and you don’t get your special power till you have played a while, so it takes a while to sample each one.

Thought I had finally found the right match when I played The Baroness, as her special power was very cool (literally – ice powers) AND she was a sniper, my fave, but there was no way I could put up with her horrible speech.

She speaks in a truly atrocious attempt at a posh British accent and says awful things about being too wealthy to die and how much she hates poor people and does it in a way that is so trite and fake that there is just no enduring it.

So I finally tried the cowgirl-type character, and she is great. I was worried that she’d be all y’all this and other corny cowboy crap, but she ain’t. She’s just a very cool chick who is good with guns and carries a whip.

And her special power lets her blast away at enemies with vastly improved damage and speed for a few seconds, and that’s fun AF.

Oh. And she’s a psycho battle monster who loves killing evil.

In other words, she’s perfect for me.

More after the break.

---

Between neurosis and psychosis

The line can be mighty fine.

I’ll start this off with a joke nobody likes or gets but me.

It’s from the late great Phil Hartman :

The difference between psychosis and neurosis is that the psychotic thinks that 2 plus two equals 5, whereas the neurosis knows that two plus two equals four, but it really bothers him.

Phil hartman

In other words,. psychotics see things that aren’t real, whereas neurotics only feel things that aren’t real.

An example would be the persistent feeling I have that nobody likes me, nobody wants me around, and they all wish I would just go away so they didn’t have to pretend not to be utterly revolted by me out of pity any more.

This is more or less the opposite of reality. There’s lots of people who love to have me around and find me quite delightful.

But the chemical distortion of depression and the damage done by a lot of regrettably formative memories drives my emotions to the wrong conclusions and it takes a specific act of will to remember the truth.

And even when I do, it still doesn’t feel true. Not completely.

I’ve been thinking about this subject because Joe, Julian, and I have been watching the new season of Castle Rock (great show, BTW) and one of the main characters is a woman with a history of mental illness, and the times when she is breathing hard and freaking out because the forces of evil are fucking with her head (like they do) I find to be rather triggering for me.

Not overwhelmingly so, but they are enough like the kind of panic attacks I have experienced to get some bad tapes playing in my head.

And that got me thinking about the times when I have been very, very ill and my emotions have gotten so intensely negative and anxious that people start to seem like monsters to me and I am imagining all kinds of things about them – that they hate me, that they are outraged that I dare to show my face in public, that any second now they are going to attack me – that are just plain looneytunes crazy.

Again, these are not hallucinations in the traditional sense. I am not seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, or touching objects that do not exist.

It’s all happening on the level of emotion and mood. That’s vastly preferable than it happening on the sensory level as with psychosis, of course.

But I do wonder if hallucinations are easier to ignore.

I mean, everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a purple dragon who farts donuts, so if you see one, you know it’s not real.

But it’s much harder to tell that your emotional perception of something is real or just a phantom of your mental illness.

It’s all just thoughts, memories, and so on either way.

Maybe some day, there will be drugs that are as good at keeping my demons away as the antipsychotics are at keeping hallucinations away.

Until then, the daily struggle will continue.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The part that isn’t my shiny big forebrain.

I realized this morning that I tend to identify almost entirely with my vaunted intelligence and not with the rest of me.

In fact, if you read this blog (and I know you do), it can almost seem like I am less a person with depression and more like a rather troubled robot.

But I am more than my mind. I am a pretty special dude even without all that mental muscle. And I think I need to remind myself of that as often as is feasible because it is that other part of me that needs to be strengthened and reinforced.

I have an overdeveloped mind and an underdeveloped everything else (soul, spirit, will, etc), and that’s an imbalance that needs to be corrected ASAP.

Not that I know a lot about things like that. That’s part of the problem.

So now I am going to try to get the ball rolling by talking about the good things about me that have nothing to do with that stainless steel intellect of mine.

There’s my kindness. That has absolutely nothing to do with my intellect. I would be the same sweet, sensitive person even if I had an average IQ.

I can’t imagine being any other way. Not with my level of empathy and depth of feeling. I pick up on other people’s emotions readily and it has taught me a lot about not just how people tick but how we are all connected by our humanity.

Then there’s my sense of humour. Granted, I might not be as witty without the big brain, but I would be just as wacky. I love to make people laugh and I am pretty sure that I still would even if I had to resort to fart jokes and pratfalls.

There is my expansive and understanding nature. I want to love, accept, and include everybody. And I want everybody to love, accept,and include one another as well. I am a harmony and happiness seeking creature, and that has nothing to do with having this white elephant of a brain to drag around.

There’s my boundless curiosity. I want to know everything about everything, basically. I has a desperate desire to understand how it all works, and I am pretty sure that would be true even if I had a lot fewer CPU cycles to dedicate to the search.

And there’s my charisma and power of personality. Pretty sure that I would still have that even without the gold plated IQ. It’s possible that without all my unused mindpower to supercharge it, my personal magnetism would not be as strong.

But it would still be there. And maybe be more effective because it would not be distorted by my odd emotional affect.

You get the idea. It’s still a hard thing for me to think about because I am so used to thinking of myself as this big brain.

But I am so much more than that.

And it’s high time I recognized that.

---

So I blasted my way through Outer Worlds.

It’s surprisingly short. When I reached the end, it really felt like I had only done like three quarters of the game at most.

Considering I paid $83 CDN for it, I have to say I feel rather ripped off. I am sure that if I had gone with my first idea, buying Borderlands 3 instead, I would be nowhere near the end of it yet, based on the previous games in the series.

Overall, the game, while excellent, feels a tad threadbare. There’s surprisingly few weapons, armors, mods, and so on. Plus there are two planets in the game’s solar system you don’t even go to, plus plenty of room on the planets you do go to for more quests and adventures.

My feeling is that there was more content planned but what I got was all that actually got completed in time for release day.

If so, then I hope the first DLC expansion for the game is free or very cheap. I am talking less than $10.

Because if not, I am going to complain to the company.

I think the mistake the devs et al made was that they didn’t realize the kind of expectations they were raising when they made a game that was so much like Fallout 4 and the rest of the series, and other games like them.

Those games have absolutely massive amounts of content. It’s one of the things I love about them. There is so much to explore and do! So many missions that I can pig out on objective-heavy content to my heart’s content for a long long time,.

I only got 47 hours of play out of Outer Worlds. By comparison, I played Fallout 4 for 577 hours. That’s more than ten times the content.

Admittedly, that was with ALL the DLC. But still, even without the DLC, it was 400 hours easy. And all for slightly less than what I paid for Outer Worlds.

My fave PC game of all time, Witcher 3 : The Wild Hunt, gave me 376 hours of fun,.

And of course, Skyrim sucked over 2000 hours (that’s 83 whole days, or 125 waking days) out of my life.

That doesn’t really count, though, as the amount of free DLC via mods for Skyrim dwarfs the size of the original game by many magnitudes.

My point is that while 47 hours might seem like a lot, it really isn’t compared to similar games, and it’s those games that set my expectations as to how much I am going to get out of a game.

And I did some Googling, and I am not alone in this. A lot of other PC gamers found the game to be surprisingly and unpleasantly short.

So at least I am not alone in my pain.

What makes it worse is that right before I bought Outer Worlds, I finished two massive games, Pillars of Eternity 2 and Borderlands : The Pre-Sequel, and so I had a rather large gap to fill.

I hope the company takes this discontent to heart, and pushes some content to fill the gap. Either that, or I hope the demand for more creates a lively and active modding community that takes the shortness of the game as a challenge.

Either way, the fact remains that the game left me wanting more in the wrong way.

Use those other two planets dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.