I was just listening to this podcast about testosterone and I have not gotten that far into it yet, so I may be jumping the gun here, but it has me intrigued.

In the podcast, they talk to a man whose body, due to a medical issue, simply stopped producing testosterone for four months.

So he got to experience what life sans testosterone was like, and as it turns out, it’s a lot like being depressed. He had no motivation, no desires, no passions. He would sit for hours doing absolutely nothing.

It turns out that testosterone is the hormone of all desires, not just the sexual ones, and without it you simply stop wanting things.

And that got me thinking about my own issues and my own frailties and wondering if maybe this mysterious psychological substance I am missing, the one whose absence makes it so hard for me to make decisions, might well be testosterone.

And ditto for a lot of the things I feel I like. Like when I talk about a lack of “life force” or “vitality” or “strength”. And how I feel so cold and lonely and depressed. Could it be that testosterone would cure some or all of my ills?

It seems too simplistic. But it could still be true.

And it would certainly be ironic if it turned out that you could replace all the antidepressants in the world with just enough testosterone to get the patient to a normal level for their gender.

Again, that’s probably far too simplistic, but it’s an amusing thought.

Unfortunately, this is not the sort of thing one can test on their own. I can’t just pick up a big ol bottle of testosterone supplements at Shopper’s Drug Mart like I could do with melotonin or whatnot.

And that’s probably a good thing, overall.

Certain activities promote the production of testosterone. The problem is that those sorts of aggressive, active activities are the exact same activities that having low testosterone makes you want to avoid.

It may be that there is a low testosterone personality type. I know that in my case, while I definitely want to come in out of the cold and feel alive and warm and happy, the idea of pumping up my testosterone levels makes me very nervous.

I know I have a veritable ocean of unexpressed rage inside me and I would be afraid that a rise in testosterone levels would unleash it all in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable fashion, and turn me into at best an asshole and at worst some kind of Incredible Hulk type rage machine.

I Googled testosterone and depression and got this here article.

Seems like the research is all over the map on this. Studies produce contradictory results, the issue is the subject of quite lively debate, more trials are needed.

Unfortunately, that’s par for the course when studying mood. There are just too damned many factors that go into mood, plus of course you have the problem that everything relating to mood is self-reported.

Still, it seems like testosterone might be a mood enhancer for some men. And not just THAT mood, either.

I will think about this while I go make Sims fuck each other.

---

Still working on the Sims sex thing. I hope I get it working soon because my lord, is that game staggeringly dull without sex.

See, I happened upon this webcomic that detailed the orgiastic delights possible in Sims 4 when you use the Wicked Whims mod to allow for simfucking.

And I was… intrigued.

So I looked up Sims 4, and found out it could be mine for only $13. So I figured, what the heck. And then I found out I could get it for even less, around $7.50, on the Origin app, and that officially sealed the deal.

So I downloaded it and installed it, and I know it at least partially worked because my Sims can definitely prance about naked now, but I haven’t figured out how to actually tell them to boink one another yet.

I want my own perverted terrarium, dammit!

The problem might be that I used a mod manager, namely Vortex by Nexus, to install the mod and Vortex does not always get the job done.

Or maybe I need to activate it somewhere. Or maybe it’s something intuitively obvious to veteran Sims players but not for male-brained folks like me.

I am sure I will figure it out eventually.

I have always found the prospect of perverted fun highly motivating.

My other holiday purchase, Red Dead Redemption 2, is currently on life support. I am probably going to return it.

It’s a great game, but apparently a terrible port. The PC version of the game (it originally came out on consoles a year ago) is notoriously bad in terms of being very hard on your PC’s resources and even people with much higher end PCs than mine are finding that the game runs extremely poorly on their machines.

As for lil ol me, I had to turn every single video option down to its lowest possible setting AND run it at minimum resolution just to get it to run without freezing every five seconds, sometimes far more often.

And it STILL freezes now and then.

So, back in the virtual box it goes, methinks. The gameplay I have managed to coax out of it makes it seem like a fairly interesting game, but my machine just can’t do it.

Dunno what I will get when the money is refunded. Assuming I can get it refunded. The cutoff is two hours of gameplay and I have technically played for 3.

But I am pretty sure that, given the game’s history of terrible implementation, they will be willing to give me my money back.

Then I can get both my money and 110 gigs of my hard drive space back, and get something I can enjoy playing.

And until then, I have perverted Sims to play with.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was in a good mood. And now I’m not.

I was happily making my lunch, which consisted primarily of toast and my leftover lamb rogan josh from last night’s order from Tandoori King Cafe. I had put the curried lamb dish on a plate and heated it up and was looking after the toast portion of the meal when I accidentally knocked the plate off the counter and SPLUT, there was my beloved curry all over the floor, ruined.

FUCK! I yelled, causing Joe to come out to see what’s up.

So now I am all pissed off at life and myself and I am shadowboxing with my depression, trying to keep it from spiraling out of control.

It’s the sort of thing that could happen to anyone. I have to remember that.

And now I find out from Facebook that my friend from back home Philip Bushell is probably not going to live much longer.

This day has taken a sudden and horrific turn.

Phil and I were pretty close a long time ago. He even slept in our storage closet for a while when my brother Dave and I were attending UPEI.

I remember long conversations going into the night in the tiny little common area of our building. He would rehash his relationships as men often do. We would talk philosophy and religion and D&D. He came from a strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing – his parents were good people but extremely narrow minded.

He’s also a Scorpio, of course. I swear I attract Scorpios from strict religious upbringings. It must be my nonthreatening manner and freemindedness.

And the thing is, now I don’t even know what is killing him. That’s how far paart we have drifted. I knew from Facebook that he was in the hospital but somehow I just assumed he would get over whatever it was and things would go back to normal.

But nope, apparently not. Making this the first time in my life that a friend has died, albeit one more from my past than my present.

And I don’t need to know the specific diagnosis to know that it’s probably obesity related. He’s built like me and my brother Dave. Bear shaped. Fat.

So this will at least stiffen my resolve to take care of myself better in the future, as hard as that is going to be. Eat less crap, more decent food. Cut back on the carbs. Try to rescue myself from my diabetes before it turns into a one way ticket to the grave.

Because I don’t want to die. And I sure as hell don’t want to end up in the hospital with tubes going everywhere, confined to a bed, trapped.

I can’t die, I haven’t even lived yet!

Guess I should get around to having a life, then. I keep putting it off. It’s so hard to even imagine myself being free and healthy and enjoying life rather than just enduring it.

There has to be a way I can be free.

But first, I have to be a lot less sick.

More after the break.

---

Okay, scary dark confession time.

There is still a part of me that does want to die. It’s still there and it still craves the sweet release of death and there is nothing I can do to make it go away.

That doesn’t mean I am suicidal. I am not suicidal. Haven’t been in a long time. All the routes between my desire for death and actually harming myself were severed long ago and have withered up and died since then.

But the desire is still there. And for it, death is the ultimate in escapism. To die is to truly, totally, and finally get away from it all. To die would mean to never, ever have to deal with anything ever again.

And that sounds pretty good to a very sick part of me. The weak part, the escape artist, the swift-footed eluder, the maniac cackling at the graveside. The kamikaze lunatic who, with the bright and shining eyes of the truly mad, would ride a busload of dynamite into the gates of hell just to make a point.

The part of me that really, really identified with The Joker. And Hannibal Lecter.

The part of me that is perfectly fine with my doing absolutely nothing to improve my health until I end up in the hospital again, because then the choice is taken away from me. I won’t have to decide to act. I won’t need the willpower to change,. I won’t have to sacrifice anything.

All those maddening options will be blissfully taken away from me, and I will return to a world where all I have to do is do what I am told and thereby please my caretakers.

And no doubt I will be a model patient, and get better, and get out of the hospital, and be smart and healthy for a while, but then go right back to my old ways the minute it feels like nobody is watching any more.

To that very, very sick part of my mind, getting run over by the oncoming train is preferable than having to choose when and how to move.

Now just how many kinds of fucked up is THAT?

All of them, I think. The entire alphabet of neurosis, from Anxiety to Zenophobia. ^[1]

And I don’t know why I have this powerful fear of decisions. It’s certainly not a question with a simple, straightforward answer. The answer lies somewhere deep into the Evil Kirk side of human nature where some savage instinct is needed in order to actually make decisions and without it, I am mist and mush and barely even there.

All I know is that I need to overcome this “freeze long enough and the decision will be taken out of your hands” bullshit if I want to save my own life.

And I do want to save my own life.

For the most part, anyway.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And this self-destructuve

The good news is that I am all out of legit sleepiness. I’ve caught up with my sleep debt, more or less, and so that, at least, is over with.

The bad news is that I still feel like sleeping because I am depressed and don’t want to have to deal with reality like, at all.

Sleep is death without the commitment, after all.

I dunno. Maybe this is just the sleepiness finally manifesting as depression despite all my struggling to make sure that did not happen.

But right now, I feel very blah. Nothing interests me. Everything hurts. I have the strong urge to bury myself somewhere deep and dark and cool and just hide from the world.

I won’t, of course. I will probably end up just semi-mindlessly playing Fallout 4 all afternoon and on into the night.

At least it will keep me distracted from my depression. Like I have said many times before, when I am playing a video game, I am not depressed. I don’t hate myself. I am not anxious or scared or confused.

My mind is too busy for any of that shit.

It’s not exactly happiness, but it’s better than being miserable.

Or so I have always assumed. Maybe I would be better off in the long run if I just let the depression happen and run its course like a fever.

Maybe resistance is futile and I would be a happier person if I just accepted that I will be depressed some of the time and it’s no big deal.

But no, no matter what, I don’t break down. I keep going instead, albeit at a very low level. But no matter how slow I go, I never stop.

Maybe I would be better off if I did break down. Stop forcing myself forward by sheer force of will and let myself fall apart completely.

Maybe then I could reset, refresh, renew, and restart fresh and new.

But the idea scares me terribly. It feels like if I was ever to stop completely, something terrible would happen. I would be trapped, somehow.

I have never been the sort of depressive who ends up having a total breakdown and spending three days in bed crying and miserable.

I’ve always felt lucky that way. But maybe there is wisdom in breakdowns. Maybe my “forever forward” attitude is not the healthy way to go. Maybe I could use some time crying in bed.

It sounds so damned boring, though. I am used to a rich diet of mental stimulation provided through this here computer of mine. If I cut myself off from that, who knows what might come crawling out of the primordial goop of my mind.

Probably something really gross, truth be told. Something diseased and fetid and broken and twisted and covered in goop.

But something that also needs love, despite its grossness.

I love you, Ugly Goo Baby. It’s not your fault you are so gross and ugly. You wouldn’t be that way if I took better care of you.

Now let’s go get something to eat.

---

Ugly Goo Baby. Got to remember that one.

So I am back. Got Tandoori King Cafe food on the way. My usual Lamb Rogan Josh. That’s lamb in a creamy curry. So damn good.

Plus some samosas, because their samosas are SO GOOD.

---

Still fairly sleepy. I was able to stay up long enough to play Fallout 4 for a while before switching over to “blogging and waiting for food” mode. So that’s a kind of accomplishment, or at least, a kind of progress.

Skip the Dishes says the order will be here in 24 minutes. So that’s the time to beat. When I order in like this, I always try to get my blogging done before the food arrives.

Not that it means much. Arguably, I would be better off ordering, then continuing to play video games until it arrives. Then I could eat and blog at the same time.

But meh. I would rather do it this way. This way I have a fun little challenge. Get the blogging done before the food arrives.

That way, I can eat and chat with the fuzzies and book face with Facebook and watch my Reddit thread videos and all that jazz.

In other words, another Saturday night chez moi.

Some day, life in the fast lane is going to catch up to me and I will end up in rehab.

Until then, I’m living large and loving it!

---

Still don’t know how to handle the reality of my own genius.

The gap between my low self esteem and my high level of ability is just too large. And it’s just too easy for my depression to simply disregard my abilities as being nothing more than something to make my like of life mobility more cruelly ironic.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all that.

I wish I was at least healthy enough to view it as a tragedy and/or a misfortune. Such a waste of potential, think of what he could be contributing, he deserves better than this, and so forth and so on.

But that is just too hard for me right now. To view this all as a tragic injustice would require a level of commitment and activation that I can’t manage at this time.

Because if it’s all a crime, then I would have to do something to stop it. That’s a fundamental part of my nature. I can’t let injustice slide. I have to do something.

And while, in theory, that sounds like a great attitude to take towards my own recovery, in practice it involves so much energy that I can’t help but imagine it ending in confusion and depression and anxiety when I run out gas on my own behalf.

Or maybe I am just plain too chicken shit to stand up for myself when there is no immediately identifiable external threat to deal with.

Maybe I am just not fit to go it alone.

Maybe this superhero needs a sidekick.

Damned if I know where to find one, though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still fairly sleepy, but I can tell that I am around three quarters caught up with my sleep debt. So the end is in sight.

Correspondingly, I am skipping the Diet Coke I normally have with lunch so that I stand a chance of catching up this afternoon and being done with the whole thing.

So it’s good ol’ tap water for me this time.

---

Found a gift from my mother I had forgot to open. It’s Apple Cinnamon Hot Chocolate. Seems like a weird combination of two things (Apple Cinnamon and Hot Chocolate) to me, but I would be game to try…. if the first THREE ingredients weren’t sugar.

I shittest thou not. First three ingredients : fructose, dextrose, and sugar.

I guess Mom forgot I was diabetic. Or thought I treated it in as cavalier a fashion as my brother Dave does, according to her.

Either way it’s kind of depressing. You expect the ones who love you to know you better than that. But she’s in her seventies, so I forgive her.

I am sure I can find someone who will like it.

---

The words are not coming easily right now. Brain is still somewhat fuzzy. After I finish this part of my blog entry, I will likely go back to bed for yet more sleep.

Still fighting to keep it from becoming depression. It’s hard to fight back the frustration at having my time on Earth stolen away from me like this. I have to keep telling myself that nothing of value is being lost.

But like I always say during these times, I don’t want to sleep. I want to do something. I want to have fun. I want to enjoy being alive.

If only I always had that kind of lust for life.

But I have always been too scared to really let my passions ignite and carry me forward. I get that “cling to my shell” feeling, like something is trying to take me away to God knows where, and so I cling like a barnacle to my sad little life instead of letting my passions and desires take me anywhere.

I wish I could see life as an adventure, full of excitement and exploration and really wild things, with new people and new experiences every single day.

But just typing that sentence filled me with panic and dread. The part of me that wants to go out and experience the world and be a part of things is, so far, no match for the part of me that wants to hide from everything and stay safe.

That’s what happens when depression has held you down for your entire adult life. Wanting to go out and conquer the world would be great… if I was 20 and not 46.

Or maybe it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference and I would be a wizard locked in his own tower no matter what.

What a depressing thought.

More after the break.

---

Got some free time, so figured I would get some more blogging done.

Mostly slept today. No big surprise there. I still feel like I am not too far from the finish line of actually catching up on sleep, but I could be wrong.

I could have merely caught up with being overtired and now is when the actual sleeping for rest and recuperation begins.

Either way, I at least feel somewhat better. So there’s that, at least.

I still feel like hibernating but at least I will be hibernating comfortably.

I wonder, though, about sleep debt. Some say that there is no such thing. But they always say it in the context of people who think it’s fine to stay up all night on weeknights because they can just catch up on sleep on the weekend, and that kind of moralistic approach makes me suspicious.

If what you are really saying is, “I don’t approve of this behaviour and therefore the basis for its justification must be false”, I don’t need to hear from you.

All I know is that sleep debt is the only framework to describe why I go through these sleepy periods that I know of, and that therefore validates it as far as I am concerned.

It might not be true for everyone, but it’s sure as hell true for me.

---

Emailed Sav-On about them not having returned the money for the grocery order I ended up canceling yet. They said it was because of someone not replying to an email but that the refund will go through within 24 hours.

BUT ALSO that it might take my financial institution another 2-5 days to process things on their end.

Seems the world giveth and taketh away a lot lately.

Whatever. At least I moved the ball forward some. Sooner or later I will get my damned money and get Red Dead Redemption 2 for myself.

God damn, but that’s a stupid name.

The basic idea is that it’s an open-world FPS like Fallouts 3, 4, and New Vegas, but instead of a post apocalyptic sci fi setting, it’s a cowboy western setting.

Not my first choice of settings, but it still sounds pretty good to me. And it’s still better than yet another god damned rehashing of Tolkien.

Elves and magic and orcs, oh my!
Elves and magic and orcs, oh my!
Elves and magic and orcs, oh my!

Sooooo frigging sick of that shit. It’s not a dealbreaker for me – after all, I played the fuck out of Skyrim – but I vastly prefer a science fiction setting.

What can I say, I am a science fiction guy. I have always strongly preferred science fiction to fantasy. Science fiction explores fascinating ideas and shows possible futures and rewards the reader for really thinking about their world and their universe.

Fantasy is mostly just a lot of hobbit suffering and elf angst by comparison.

Call me weird, but I would rather play around with ideas myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, Christmas happened.

Had a lovely evening with Joe’s family. Ate a lot of things I should not eat, but what the hell, Xmas day is my one day off from worrying about my diabetes so I took advantage.

Ended up feeling sick from it, but I knew that would happen.

I went into it with my eyes open.

Right now, I am feeling fairly sleepy. And I have already slept a lot. So it seems like this is going to be one of my sleepy days.

Oh well. It’s not like I am ever a juggernaut of productivity anyway. So I will end up not playing a lot of Fallout 4.

Nothing of value will be lost.

Hell, at least when I am asleep, I am getting something done.

Gifts : Mom gave me $50, which I really need because it’s one of those thrice damned five week months.

I mean, I would have been okay even without it because January is a GST cheque month, but still, it’s good to have the added security.

Anne got me a $75 Amazon gift card, which I have already invested into a very nice microphone for my computer so I can try getting into podcasting.

Not sure what form a podcast via me would take. Probably something philosophical.

Catherine got me a Starbucks gifts card. Le sigh. Like I ever go to Starbucks. Most of what they serve has sugar in it, for crying out loud.

Maybe I will go in for a smoothie some day.

You already know about Joe, Julian, and Felicity getting me a $50 Steam gift card and me getting Disco Elysium and not liking it and returning it.

Well, the refund went through so I have $50 to invest in a new game again. Back to square one and all that.

Pondering a game called Greedfall right now. Seems like my cuppa.

My brother Dave got me a cute coffee mug that says “Oh, for (adorbs picture of a fox) sake!”. In other words, “Oh, for fox sake!”.

Say it out loud if you do not get the joke.

Oy, the words, they do not come easy right now. Want to sleeeeeeep.

As for gift output, I got/will get Felicity a full box set of an 80’s cartoon called The Adventures Of The Galaxy Rangers.

I had never even heard of the show before I met her,and it’s quite good. Pretty deep science fiction for a kid’s show.

I got Joe a whack of MP3’s, and Julian is getting a wallet.

I also might get Red Dead Redemption 2, but if so, that will have to wait until I get my refund from Sav On Foods for the grocery order I canceled.

I have never been into Westerns as a movie or TV genre, but I find I enjoy being a cowboy in video games a lot more than I do watching them.

Plus, it has crazy good reviews. 93 percent on Metacritic. So there’s that.

And with that, I am out of words. Time to go back to sleep.

More after the break.

---

Further on RDR2 :

Weirdly, the reviews on Steam aren’t nearly as good. Dunno what to make of that.

Anyhow, on with the whatever.

---

On the fading away

Still pretty sleepy, despite having slept a whole lot today.

But I am doing my best to keep sleepiness from becoming depression. So I am sleepy. So I am sleeping a lot.

Big deal. It’s not like this is going to last forever. Eventually, I will catch up with my sleep debt and be able to go on with life feeling refreshed and alert.

I just have a whole lot of sleeping to do first.

I am so glad I found my mirtazapine. It is a way, way better sleep aid for me than the zopiclone I have been taking while looking for the mirtazapine.

Zopiclone gets the job done – it keeps me asleep so I can get some decent REM time instead of having my mind steadily become shallower as my medium term memory fills up and starts taking up more room in my working memory.

Brain science is so much fun.

But zopiclone, like trazadone, has a tendency to leave me groggy and disoriented and all my other “bad sleep” stuff when I wake up, and that really bums me out, dude.

And the sleep I get from those two drugs is better than no sleep at all, but still not of very good quality.

Not so with mirtazapine. I get actual good sleep from it. The kind where, miracle of miracles, I actually feel better upon waking than I did before I slept.

I’m used to sleep generally leaving me worse off in the short term.

So at least all this sleeping is actually getting me somewhere. I am still pretty sleepy, but not nearly as sleepy as I was when I wrote the first half of this blog entry.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I am fairly certain it’s not a frontal lobe seizure causing me to hallucinate.

Although if it was, I would at least find out what kind of religious vision a total hardcore rational materialist like me would have.

And would it turn me into some form of transcendentalist? It’s not impossible. The frontal lobe contains the part of the brain that tells us what is objectively real (extracranial) and what is happening only in our minds (intracranial) and hence those religious visions often feel “realer than real” .

No wonder people conclude that they have glimpsed a higher order of reality. How could they conclude anything else? It felt so real!

I suspect that if I had an experience like that, it would take the form of communion with some kind of angelic alien – a morally perfect being, by my standards. A being of pure compassion and understanding and love.

That would be sufficiently moving and meaningful to me to encompass the experience without requiring me to believe in anything too offensive to my rationality.

After all, morally perfect aliens might exist out there somewhere. Or even something far greater that we, with our limited minds and feeble souls, can only comprehend as a morally perfect alien being.

I mean, ya never know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In other words, more stuff about my Mars being in Pisces.

Like I said before, Mars is not happy in Pisces. Fire and water don’t mix. At best, there are times when I can harness my Rising Sign of Cancer to rally together with the Mars in Pisces and get a good head of steam going.

From an artcle on The Astro Codex :

A Mars in Pisces person can be lacking self-confidence, especially if the native is a male

…Copyright (©) https://theastrocodex.com – Read more at https://theastrocodex.com/natal-mars-in-pisces/

Yo. I resemble that.

Thus, the native does not learn how to fight in life, frequently being afraid to take decisions.

…Copyright (©) https://theastrocodex.com – Read more at https://theastrocodex.com/natal-mars-in-pisces/

The article is talking about Mars in Pisces with a weak father figure. They are talking about fathers into substance abuse and such, but it also works for my situation, namely that I had a father with anger control issues who scared me too much for me to even begin to bond with him and he spent very little time guiding me or helping me.

I will give him credit, though. He tried. He took me and my brother Dave out shooting (at tin cans and bottles only, of course). He got me to help him in his little work shop. He took me on that trip in 88. He really did try.

But those were isolated incidents. Even when it was just him and me watching the news, I was still scared of him, and that meant I could never really connect with him.

I was just too sensitive and frankly wimpy for the kind of fathering he could provide. And I know I have suffered because of that. If things had been different, perhaps he would have taught me to be tougher and face the world head on more often.

Instead, I am deep and sensitive but also weak and timid.

Very Mars in Pisces.

Luckily, I don’t have trouble sticking up for myself when challenged. Direct challenges are not just easy for me, I enjoy them way too much. I am not the sort that gets pushes around or intellectually bullied.

Hmmm. The article says the best way to strengthen my weak psyche is through exercise. I am going to have to think that over.

Then there’s this :

This natal placement can make an individual hold his anger inside, which is definitely not the best thing to do for long. As this energy searches desperately ways to come out, it might affect the chart bearer’s body through psychological problems, fears and nightmares…

…Copyright (©) https://theastrocodex.com – Read more at https://theastrocodex.com/natal-mars-in-pisces/

Boy, does that ever apply to me. I have never been comfortable expressing my anger on a personal level. I can passionately defend my ideals all day, and of course I love to argue, and will come to the defense of others without hesitation or fear.

But my own personal anger about things that have been done to me and all the emotional inputs that I never got in my life?

That’s hard, man.

More after the break.

---

Let’s talk about keeping in contact.

I am not good at it. It’s a shyness thing. It is very, very hard for me to initiate contact with me. I always feel like I will be interrupting them. Like I am barging in to their busy and important lives and they will resent it and wish I would leave them alone.

Plus I have never had a lot of initiative to begin with. Probably another Mars in Pisces thing. So it’s hard for me to initiate damn near anything, really.

It can be so hard simply to decide to do something.

Because I know this about myself, I have often felt guilty about all the people in my life with whom I have lost contact and lack the chutzpah to regain it. I always imagine that these people think I hate them or that I don’t give a shit about them or something equally horrifying, and have given up on me.

It’s not true, of course. But I still feel guilty.

But here’s the thing. I am not the only one who can contact people. If they wanted contact with me, they could take it upon themselves to make the first move.

And if they do, they will get my usual enthusiastic warm greeting, and I will be genuinely delighted to hear from them.

So clearly, none of these semi-mythical people miss contact with me all that much. Not enough to actually be bothered to drop me a line and say hello.

So it’s not all my fault, anyhow. People just aren’t all that keen to deal with me.

That’s both better and worse.

---

More wet Martian stuff :

In their attempt to not hurt others, they may hurt themselves.

…Copyright (©) https://theastrocodex.com – Read more at https://theastrocodex.com/natal-mars-in-pisces/

Look. If it’s a choice between hurting others and hurting myself, I will hurt myself every single time. And I will feel noble and justified in doing so.

I refuse to pass the pain along. It dies in me. I will not perpetuate the cycle of victimization by injecting my pain into some else’s veins. It stops right here.

And if that means I carry that shit till the day I die, fine.

I will die knowing I subtracted some pain from the world.

---

That does leave the question of how the bad stuff is supposed to get out, though.

Venting on deserving targets is one solution. Of course, the real deserving targets are the people who neglected and mistreated me.

But the big one, my preschool rapist, is not available because I don’t even know who he is. I don’t remember a face, even.

My bullies didn’t exactly go on to wonderful lives. All the teachers that could not be bothered to care for or defend me are probably dead by now. I could hurl a lot of thunderbolts at my family but I don’t want to face the blowback and I don’t want to lose what little connection with them I have.

So where does all my anger go?

Well I am a writer. So I suppose I could write a thinly-disguised tell-all novel.

Call it Summerside Place.

I wonder how much I will get for the movie rights….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, let’s get the obligatory music link out of the way :

But what I really want to talk about starts with this video :

OK, so maybe watching that video was not a good idea for me, a highly neurotic person who has been in therapy for a real long time and might be prone to wondering if they themselves were a lost cause.

Too late now. Damage is done.

And I don’t think I am a lost cause, but the remarks about the patients who are in therapy forever and who just rehash the same stuff over and over struck home.

And it made me wonder about my own situation, where I see my therapist almost every week and yet I have flat out told him that “doing things” is not an option for me because “doing things” is my whole problem and it’s just not going to happen.

That seems like a pretty defeatist and ignorant attitude to take to me now. I mean, what’s a therapist even supposed to do with that?

And this is where the freeze frame comes in, because that is what is stopping me. When I even think of doing something outside the apartment, something that would expand my world, I freeze up inside.

And I don’t know how to fix that. There is no direct, blunt force attack way to overcome it. I can’t blast it away with passion or smash it with willpower or dissect it with analysis or overwhelm it with an application of sheer intellect. I can’t charm it or amuse it or distract it away.

And that’s pretty much my entire toolkit.

I only unfreeze when I am sure the “predator” – which in this case is the prospect of leaving my teeny tiny comfort zone – is gone.

And that’s pure instinct and emotion, which operate well below the level my powerful conscious mind can access.

Trying to grasp them consciously feels like I am trying to grab at something frozen deep in crystal clear ice. I can see it. It’s right there. But I can’t reach it or even touch it.

And my hands go numb when I try.

In that situation, I don’t know what I can do beyond therapy and blogging. I try to imagine possibilities and all I get is more numbing cold blasts of ice cold fear.

There’s always the litany of things I “could do”. Promote this blog. Apply for writing jobs. Get back into freelancing. Start a podcast. Lose all respect for myself and sell my body on the street.

But I can’t do those things. The ice prevents me.

Maybe if I can hold one of them in my mind for long enough, it will melt, and become possible for me.

Now all I have to do is pick one…..

More after the break.

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Pretty fucking depressed right now.

More chemical bullshit. Such is my life. Right now I feel like I would do anything just to be able to feel something right now.

That suggests that depression and numbness are linked – that the more numb you become, the more depressed you express.

Or something like that.

I just keep waking up like this. And it sucks. Maybe my sleep apnea is getting worse and I feel this bad because I need some fucking oxygen.

Seems as likely as anything else.

My head hurts too, which is consistent with low oxygen. Or sinus pressure. Or a million billion other things.

The easy answer would be that I am depressed because I am all alone on Xmas Eve. And I am sure that doesn’t help, but honestly, I don’t think that is really it.

This is a lot deeper and more primal than that. I would pay a lot of money for it to be something as simple and sensible as loneliness.

I feel so very small right now. Just like before. Small and scared and fragile and wanting to scream bloody murder into the cold night air just to express all the fucked up feelings rolling and roiling inside me right now.

Yawning big time now. Yup, it’s the oxygen thing.

Did Xmas with the roomies today. Got Joe some mp3s, Felicity will be getting a boxed set of Galaxy Rangers (great show) DVDs, and Julian will get a wallet I bought for myself but decided I did not like.

I know that sounds bad but trust me, it’s what he wants.

They pooled their resources and got me a $50 Steam gift card. I have used it to purchase and download a game with the highly unlikely name “Disco Elysium”.

No, it’s not a music or dancing game.

Other than that, I dunno, because I haven’t played it yet. Other things keep popping up and getting in the way. I will try it soon, though, and likely report my impressions here.

I got it because it sounds interesting and the reviews are spectacular. It has a Metacritic score of 91 percent, which is pretty frigging rare.

We will see how I take to it. Worst case scenario, I end up not liking it and return it and find something else to play.

Not going to try it when I am still feeling like I feel right now, though. Right now I hate everything and everyone.

Not the ideal setup for trying new things, especially when you tend to vacillate between neophobia and neophilia like I do.

I wonder how much getting home oxygen would cost me. I could really go for some of the straight up pure stuff right about now.

Yawning is taking too fucking long.

Well, Merry Effing Christmas to me, I guess. I can hear people partying in my apartment complex. Must be nice to have people to be with tonight.

Instead, I am all alone, as usual. The lonely little boy out in the dark and the cold, looking in on the warm welcoming world he’s never been a part of, wondering what it would be like to truly be alive.

Slowly freezing to death.

I will talk to you nice people on Christmas Day.

Not sure what I want to write about right now. But I have confidence that if I just start writing, something will emerge.

I could have decided that I just wasn’t “feeling it” right now and punt this task into the future, but that would have been lame.

Fuck waiting until you are inspired. Create with whatever is in your head right now. Don’t wait for some bullshit magical “moment”. That’s just procrastination talking.

Unless you know, for a fact, that when this magic moment comes, you will drop everything and pounce on the inspiration and use it till its fullest to GET SHIT DONE, you’re just lying to yourself.

I mean seriously…. has that ever actually happened? Have you ever been struck with inspiration and dashed to your computer (or easel, or whatever) and created something wonderful with that energy?

As far as I can tell, procrastination is the number one enemy of art. It’s always easiest to think of all the wonderful art you will create “some day”,even though you haven’t made the slightest move towards doing anything for a long long time.

I call this the “horizon effect”, because doing your art is always sitting there comfortably on the horizon, reassuringly constant in how it always stays the exactly same distance in time away – not so far as to seem like forever away, but not so close that it actually feels like you will actually do it any time soon.

Because actually doing it is hard, and scary, and stressful, and there are always millions of easier, lower effort, higher reward things you could be doing.

So no, you will just wait for the mythical day when creating art becomes easier and more fun that watching Netflix or eating a donut.

Aaaany day now.

---

That’s why I often say to myself, “the only way to do it is to do it”.

It seems like a tautology, as if I am saying “the only way for it to be white is if white is its color” or something similarly foolish.

But you’d be amazed at how easy it is to get caught up in doing everything about your art except actually doing it, and then end up wondering why that isn’t working.

So do it. Choose to do the harder thing that is less immediately rewarding. Do the thing that takes actual effort instead of just doing whatever is easiest.

Because until you can do that, you are not an artist.

You’re just someone with nice thoughts about yourself.

---

Of course, I am in a sense talking to myself here. But not about the whole “actually doing it” point of view. In point of fact, I am doing it right now.

So I can be smugly superior about that.

But it never really goes anywhere. I know I have the talent to be a really great writer but none of that matters because I haven’t been able to work up the nerve to put my work in front of any kind of gatekeepers, or even a broader audience.

For me, the making of the art is easy. I’m a creator. I love to create.

It’s what happens after that has me stumped.

More after the break.

---

I know the minute Christmas is over, I will think of a million things I will wish I had done and be filled with regret.

Doesn’t move me to do anything about it now, though.

---

At the mercy of the tides

Pretty depressed right now. But I don’t care.

Because it’s all just chemical bullshit anyway. The dark tide has risen within me and so now I am stuck feeling small and helpless and cold and I am just sooooo over this.

Whatever, brain. I will wait out the storm and when the holy morn breaks I will pick up the pieces and move on and you will have accomplished absolutely nothing.

It’s just the weather.

Speaking of music, I thought of another song that speaks to that deep part of me.

Like Eye in the Sky by the Alan Parsons Project, it expresses my very strange and spooky kind of anger.

So to me, it all makes perfect sense. And it sounds like the sort of thing I might write if I wanted to warn someone who had wronged me that I was coming for them.

And, admittedly, if I was less concerned about being accessible and/or being liked. I have great respect for the poets and other artists who simply express what they need to express without worrying about whether people will “get it” or not.

I have too great a need to communicate for that. But as you all know, I am getting better about that. I quite often express myself in poetic terms in this blog.

Were I a trifle bolder, I might even get into actual poetry. Show up at poetry open mic type events, lay my words out plain and unbolded for the people, and then leave people to make of it what they will.

Those are the dark truths of a lonely shadow. The tawdry secrets and cheap little baubles that I bring back as mementos and tiny treasures from my trips into the deeper darkness of my soul.

Darkness can scream
And silence can bleed
And isolation can make ivory towers crumble into ruin

See? I’d make a great poet. That shit’s impressive, y’all.

And I mean every word of it, too. There is much in me that can’t be expressed in ordinary language. Even by someone with my skills and versatility. Imagistic poetic language is the only kind that comes close to being able to express what I need to express, and even then I feel like i am only making faint sketches of the beautiful dreams and dark machines inside me.

It would be amusing if I became a poet. I have avoided it for a long time because I thought there was no money in it.

But it’s not like I am making mad bank with my current lifestyle either.

I will think about it as I nap.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Everything in that song speaks to me.

And it speaks to a very specific part of me. The deepest part of me, the part I have never really understood. The part that gets deeply moved by seemingly random things. The part that makes me feel my beliefs with every fiber of my being. The part of me that embraces deep compassion and what the words ascribed to Christ really mean.

The Pisces part of me, basically. Mars in Pisces.

It’s the part of me that makes me a shapeshifter. That flexible sense of self. It gives me the ability to (metaphorically) open doors by flowing like water into the lock then solidifying momentarily into a perfect key.

This is why I say mysterious things like “the lock implies the key” or “the shape of the lock is the shape of the key”. It’s the closest I have come to finding a way to explain how my particular genius works.

Still pretty confusing, I know.

Back to the song. One of the lines that really strikes me deeply at the moment is “but I was a fool / playing by the rules”.

I know that feeling well. The feeling that you have been a chump for playing by someone else’s rules and trying to be normal when you know damned well you could chuck those rules whenever you want and play by your own.

It makes me feel like I tricked myself into being stupid and tiny and limited when I am a maker of rules, not a follower of them. I am the type who sees past the rules and the limitations of others in order to see the truth.

Speaking of being a maker of rules……

That’s another song that resonates deeply with that deep and secret part of me. It expresses the bizarre combination of passive Pisces and angry Mars better than anything I have ever seen or heard.

It makes for a very strange and spooky kind of anger. Even I get kind of freaked out by myself when I get into that mode. It gives me enormous power because I act from such a deep sense of how things work that it can seem like magic to those with a smaller and narrower point of view.

My sister Anne is a much more straightforward person than I, and would sometimes be rather freaked out by the deeply devious and intricate way my mind works.

She would say to me, “nobody should be able to do that”. Which was weird to hear as an innocent kid just doing what came naturally.

And she’s no dummy. She’s extremely intelligent. But there is a quality to my mind that is not present in hers and it freaks her out.

I sometimes suspect it freaks my friends out a little too. They’re just used to it.

I will try to come up with some specific examples before I return after the break.

---

It occurs to me that the phrase “I am the maker of rules” requires some explanation.

See, most people follow rules set out for them without even knowing it. They are playing someone else’s game, and they are doing it so unconsciously that to them, the rules seem like reality.

But they aren’t. They’re just rules.

Even smart, ambitious, resourceful people get caught in this trap because they think the idea is to win the game, which they call “success”.

But it’s still someone else’s game. And these people realize that when they get all the things they worked so hard for and they are still not happy.

Happiness is the only meaningful definition of success.

The secret to being a maker of rules, then, starts with the realization that there is a reason for rules, and from there you gain the ability to judge rules.

Good rules are needed and perform a function. Bad rules are unnecessary and serve only to make life stupider and worse.

Once you can make that kind of judgment, you realize that there are a lot of bad rules out there and that people suffer a great deal from the restrictions and delusions imposed by these bad rules and you become determined not to let that happen to you so you pursue a larger view of the world.

And that is when you are on the precipice of true power, because once you can see the flies trapped in the web of lies about the world and you can escape from that web yourself, you can see the power of being able to spin your own web,.

Even the ability to move in and out of the web at will brings great power. From the point of view of the flies, you move in and out of reality like you are three dimensional and they are 2D. Your ability to simply shrug off social restrictions that they themselves view as reality makes you a powerful (and terrifying) wizard in their eyes.

Or as it’s more commonly known, it makes you “weird”.

I’ve often thought of myself as some kind of wizard. I can see why others in my position feel like they have access to a hidden plane of reality from which they draw power.

Metaphorically speaking, it’s true.

So when you are a “maker of rules”, you are a secret master of reality because you can reweave those webs to suit yourself. You can control and manipulate social reality, and social reality is the only reality most people know.

It is an enormous amount of power to have and thus can be quite terrifying to the individual wizard who was, after all, just trying to figure out what is really going on.

Most get a glimpse of this power and then steel doors slam down in their mind to protect them from the enormity of it all.

It’s only demented weirdos like myself who remain fully conscious of the power and the possibilities, and even I am too scared to use my powers much.

I may stand outside social reality, but that doesn’t mean I have some other, superior reality in which to live.

It’s just me, out there in the darkness, looking in on all the people and their lives, and wishing I could be a part of them,.

But that’s a spell I may never learn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still feeling pretty good. But my appetite just crashed.

That’s been happening now and then lately. My appetite will just vanish suddenly. It’s like a steel trap shuts somewhere just under where food exits my stomach,

Luckily, there is not much nausea (at least by my queasy standards). And it falls to zero appetite, where I have no interest in food, as opposed to negative appetite, where the very concept of eating is repulsive.

And to be honest, it makes for a refreshing change from my usual state of hyperphagy. I am ashamed to admit it, but I have just gotten used to being super hungry all the god damned time. It should be a signal that I need insulin ASAP.

But it ain’t. Or at least, it hasn’t been.

I suppose I can say that one of my New Year’s resolutions is to take better care of myself. But I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself.

Call it a plan instead. That seems about right.

Actually, fuck that weaksauce.

In 2020, I will take better care of myself.

That’s more like it!

Been getting back to Fallout 4. Finally got totally sick of Fallout New Vegas and its gross limited palette and all the rest.

So I figured, time to go forward to Fallout 4.

It’s still one of my fave PC titles of all time. Only Witcher 3 truly surpasses it, and that’s because of Witcher 3’s amazing writing and art direction.

Such wonderful grimdark.

I’ve been installing the sexytimes stuff this morning, even though the sexytimes stuff for Fallout 4 is nowhere near as good as the stuff for Skyrim.

But we don’t talk about Skyrim.

There’s still fun to be had, but the system for it is rather clunky (powerful interface, but clumsy to use…. kind of ruins the spontaneity of lust) and I miss the carefree, sex with anything you want good times of other games.

It’s a cheerful place, that world of porn. Everyone can get down with whoever they like, whenever they like, wherever they like, and there aren’t all these artificial barriers getting in the way of people celebrating the joy of life via the miracle of sex.

That’s right, the miracle of sex. It’s miraculous that we all have this capacity for mindblowing pleasure and all it requires is a willing partner. The fact that two humans can have so much intimacy and pleasure and it doesn’t cost a dime, it doesn’t have to be earned, and it’s so amazingly rewarding blows my mind.

That’s why I am such a libertine freak.

Well, that and the fact that I am extremely perverted and want my every wicked desire to be fulfilled.

But I want that kind of freedom for everyone else, too. I think the world would be a much better place if it was more like my dreams.

There should be the equivalent of gay baths (but for all gender combinations) everywhere. They should be as common as gyms.

And everywhere understands that you go there when you are horny and are looking for a playmate or ten.

People would be so much happier and more fulfilled and have so much more love for one another from, well…. loving one another.

But that’s just my crazy Utopian dream.

If I am ever rich and famous, I will at least make it a reality on a small scale.

Say, the size of my mansion and grounds.

Dare to dream, huh?

More after the break.

---

Time to order in, like I do every Saturday.

Problem is, I still have zero appetite. That’s going to make it kind of hard to decide what I want, because to be honest, I don’t want anything.

This is becoming a concern. One low appetite meal is an aberration but two in a row makes me suspicious. Perhaps something more is going on now.

It’s tempting to blame the antibiotic I am on, azithromycin. The literature for it seems to say that the main concern re : side effects is gastrointestinal distress. So it would be plausible to imagine that it’s the thing that is mucking up my appetite.

Problem is, I am pretty sure I had zero appetite before I took the pill, while I was writing about it earlier today.

Plus, I am feeling a little lightheaded and I don’t think it’s just because I was just masturbating (without success).

Though I am sure that…. does not help. What can I say, I was bored waiting for my computer to reboot. So I started browsing my porn collection and one thing led to another and I took the situation firmly in hand.

What the hell, it’s the only expression my sexuality gets. And most of the time, it ain’t that great. I mean, it’s fun and all, but leaves me tired and frustrated after.

And you know what? I could sit here and once more talk about how crazy I am to get me some cock and how I wish I could go to the baths like a regular fag (social anxiety says no, as does claustrophobia) and how I dream of being rich enough to have pretty boys offering me hot cock on tap all the time and so forth and so on.

But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that society makes it impossible, or at the very least incredibly dangerous, to pursue my real, actual sexuality.

My fantasies along those lines have taken a dark turn lately. I fear that I am entering that phase of life that makes middle aged men unable to suppress their true sexuality any more and causes them to do stupid things that wreck their lives.

It is what happens when any biological drive builds up unexpressed. Whether it’s lust, hunger, or the need to take a shit, eventually the body takes over from the mind and the individual does something life-ruining without even deciding to do so.

Our free will is always a rental. We rent it from our base animal natures and as long as we keep making the payments, everything is fine.

But get too far behind on those payments, and the magic of civilization loses all its power and we lose control.

And I hope that never happens to me.

But the only surefire way to prevent that is to give it what it wants.

And we all know that’s not going to happen like….. ever.

And I don’t know what to do about that.

Sooner or later, it’s gonna happen.

I kinda hope I die before it goes that far.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.