Not feeling very wordy right now. Dunno why. Actually considered punting doing part 1 of my day’s blogging to later in the afternoon.

But what the hell. I’m here eating my lunch. Might as well squeeze some words out.

---

Been pondering smartness lately.

My own, mostly. No surprise there.

There are times when the feeling of power in my mind pushes me towards madness. It’s like some part of me knows that all this mind power of mine should be being used towards extending power into the world and the fact that I use so very little of it that way leaves it to accumulate in my mind like an electrical charge the sheer intensity of it can make me feel like I am going mad.

Like at any second, it’s going to be Messiah Complex delusions of grandeur time, with me cackling and madly orating at innocent passersby and probably ending up in jail because, sooner or later, I would actually try to be a supervillain.

The thing is, it’s hard for me to imagine something I could do in my current circumstances that would tap into more of that energy.

I suppose I could up my daily wordcount. Take it to 1500, maybe. But that does not seem like the right solution. I don’t need more of the same.

I need something exciting and new.

But there’s so little I can do with the limited emotional resources I have. If I am going to have some serious impact on the world, I am going to need more spoons.

And that means getting myself healthier.

And that means taking ALL my pills, including Ramipril and Lipitor, neither of which I have been taking.

I ignored Lipitor for a long time because I didn’t think I really needed it. It was prescribed to me because of slightly elevated cholesterol levels, and I figured, meh, big deal.

But my latest test results showed a cholesterol level only one pussy hair shy of being twice the healthy level, so like…. yeah.

Time to take that shit seriously.

And my blood sugar test showed more sugar than blood. Le sigh. Once more, I have cut way the fuck back on the carbs, start injecting insulin on a regular basis, and above all, get a fucking blood glucometer.

Not sure what to make of the low salt levels in my blood. Doc Chao said I should drink less water, but I don’t see that happening.

I drink a lot of water. And I like that. I think it both keeps me hydrated and gives me a completely harmless regular oral fix that keeps me away from less healthy options.

But I can’t imagine adding more salt to my diet. Not with my high blood pressure.

Which is also getting worse, and I really need to get on top of that. Diabetes plus high blood pressure equals something’s gonna blow.

And that would be like….. bad.

So maybe I should make improving my health my top priority for a while.

But then I start to feel that
That the story’s too damned real
And in the present….. tense.

More on that after the break.

---

Surprise plot twist!

I actually feel pretty good right now.

What a nice feeling. Why, I feel practically alive.

This is lovely. This is marvelous. I want this feeling to go on forever.

Now let’s analyze it until it goes away because it’s WEIRD.

Seriously though, I have been feeling better ever since I started taking the antibiotics that Doctor Chao hurriedly prescribed me on Wednesday.

The ironic twist is that it hasn’t had any effect on my actual primary symptoms. My lungs are still heavy and scratchy, I still have an ache that goes from the base of my throat all the way into my ears, and my joints are still stiff.

I just feel a lot better, ya know, generally.

I feel more energetic, more focused, more cheerful, and more optimistic. The stinking haze that usually clouds my feelings and my thoughts is gone, or at least, drastically reduced. I feel positively bouncy.

How can this be? My current theory (of course I have a theory) is that I have had a low level secondary infection for a long long time and this antibiotic killed it.

If so, I want to keep these good times rolling. So I will do my best to tackle some of my health problems while I can.

For example, I am going to dig up my insulin injector pen (again) and give myself some of that sweet, sweet insulin that my body needs to get the sugars out of my blood and into my cells where they can be used as fuel.

Amazing to think that for a diabetic like me, you can have so much sugar in your blood that it’s the consistency of maple syrup and yet your cells are starving.

I will also dig up my Rampiril and my Lipitor so I can start taking them like I am supposed to have been doing for a long long time.

It seems nuts, but the more drugs I am on, the more I resist adding another. Individually, taking a pill is a simple thing. But when you’re on seven different drugs, and someone wants to add numbers eight and nine, you resist.

Or at least I do.

And I admit, it’s getting hard to keep track. I am actually contemplating asking the pharmacy to do the blister-pack thing with all my drugs – that’s where each meal’s doses are in their own little blister, and the blisters are chronological by meal.

It’s meant for old people with dementia, but what can I say, I have always been an advanced student and my depression make me absentminded at a 60 year old level.

It would be nice to not have to think about it, especially when I am having one of my very bad days where it’s very very hard to think at all.

I used to do it myself with my pill box. I would fill each little compartment with the right pills for lunch and for dinner.

But then I ended on so many damned pills that they wouldn’t fit in the little compartments any more.

Don’t that just figure?

“Sorry, sir, but you are now too sick for your pillbox. ”

So I guess I need a pillbox the size of a bass harmonica if I want to continue to DIY this whole prepackaged doses thing.

Something to ask Santa for, maybe?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P. S. ref pic :

Therapy Thursday. Today’s session was… intense.

First off, we showed up late. My fault – I think I set my alarm for 12:25 am and not 12:25 pm. D’oh! That’s so me.

So we didn’t even leave until 12:45 pm, otherwise known as the time of the appointment. Not a good feeling.

By the time I got there, having been suddenly awoken by Julian (for the very best of reasons) and low blood sugar from not having time to eat before I left plus the utterly horrid weather (dark, cold, grey, rainy) had me, to put it mildly, in a melancholic mood.

In other words, I was depressed as hell. And so for most of the session I vented all my frustrations and fears, or at least a representative sample thereof.

It started with the shit I talked about yesterday about how disappointed I was that I had to remind my fucking doctor why he had ordered the test results we had gone through, and then kinda spiraled down in ever tightening circles like a crippled bomber in its death throes until we crashed at “I’m too sick to do the things that would make me well”

So the good part is that I expressed a lot of my negative shit and that is always a good thing in the long run but feels fucking awful while it is happening and shortly after.

The parallels to

So right now I feel pretty crappy, although food has helped a lot. I am still not in a very good mood but at least I don’t feel like I am dying from the inside out.

I feel like I am still learning to let the bad stuff out. I still struggle with the side of me that feels like my only safety lies in being cute and pleasant and fluffy and fun and never showing my dark side to the world at all.

To in fact hide that side of me in shame and terror, afraid that if people see it they will flee from me forever.

But the thing is, the darkness is part of me as well. And it needs to be expressed. It doesn’t matter how the world reacts to my ugliness and it doesn’t matter how little I, myself, want to pretend that all is lovely flappy Happyland with me all the time.

What you cannot express owns you. Over time, it accumulates, and gets stronger and takes over more and more of your mental resources while you sit there wondering why you find it so hard to think, helpless against the burglars you won’t admit exist.

Hmmm. There’s a pretty decent story structure in there somewhere.

I have decades of ice cold silence stored in those places where normal human emotions and instincts should be. It all has to be dug up and melted and that means it has to be felt and experienced on some level.

And that’s why I have come to associate an icy cold feeling in my chest with psychological progress. It means I am birthing my trauma and pushing all that terrible isolation and pain and inwards-turning and that always sucks but it is way, way better than holding it all in.

Call it the Shawshank Road to Recovery.

Because before you are free, you have to go through a lot of shit.

---

Feeling somewhat better after a long nap.

The darkness inside me never rests. It roils, it boils, it squirms, it worms its way around. There is a fundamental instability at the very core of my being that is both the source of my mental anguish and the engine of my enormous creativity.

The relationship between creativity and depression goes very deep.

After all, all that inspiration has to come from somewhere.

Creativity requires chaos. There has to be a generator of the possibilities that the selector element then combs through to find the good stuff.

And for many of us highly creative types, that generator is a dark and terrible wound that cannot heal.

It’s hard for me to imagine a life where nothing ever just pops into someone’s head, let alone the often quite rich, complex, and surprisingly complete ones that pop into mine.

But that’s how it must be for a lot of people. Well, maybe not quite absolute – it’s not that they never get spontaneous idea but they don’t get them all the time, like I do.

My head is always teeming with ideas, thoughts, emotions, processes, and every other form of mentation known to man and God.

It’s a pretty loud neighborhood, but we have our fun.

And it’s been that way for as long as I can remember. I suppose that’s what happens when a kid with a naturally high IQ turns pathologically inwards.

They build a playground in their mind and stay there most of the time.

And the thing is, I know that I have all this power. My mind is an incredible thing and I am one heck of a guy and I could do amazing things in the world.

But first I have to escape this cage of fear that is holding me back and that keeps me playing fucking video games in order to not have to deal with life at all.

But the same thoughts keep circling in my head.

I can’t do this by myself.
But nobody can help me either
Nobody can come into my mind and be my willpower and resolve
But I can’t do this by myself

And so forth and so on, ad infinitum ad nauseum.

All I can do is keep birthing my trauma. Just keep painfully pushing out another shard of shattered glass, one after another. Keep throwing up onto the page until I have purged the toxins from my system.

That’s gonna take a long time. I’ve got a lot of toxins.

Is there such a thing as a juice cleanse for the soul?

At least I can try to make my physical self a little healthier. Take ALL of my pills, move around a little more, find more productive kinds of fun.

I haven’t made music in a while. Or videos.

Maybe it’s time I got back to things like that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight, I do standup at the open mic at the Kingswood.

This is not optional.

See, I missed last week because I felt sick. I talked about it back then. I really didn’t want to skip a week, but in the end, I decided to favour my health and not my ambitions.

But even back then, I knew what that would mean :

I am going on tonight no matter what.

That’s because I know damned well that if I don’t go on tonight, I will probably never go on again. I will lose all my remaining momentum and this will become yet another thing I did for a little while then stopped when the initial burst of energy ran out.

Well fuck that noise. I’m hangin’ on, man.

It’s especially important to go on tonight because there won’t be another open mic night at the Kingswood Pub for a couple of weeks.

That’s because today is December 18th. That means next Wednesday is the 25th of December, otherwise known as CHRISTMAS.

Something tells me the place won’t even be open that day, let alone hosting our silly ass open mic night.

Besides, I have plans for that day. Xmas dinner with Joe’s family. Wouldn’t miss it.

And the Wednesday after that is New Year’s Day, and people will be too busy being truly and righteously hung over to come to the pub that got them that way.

Now, if we could go on New Year’s Eve, that would really be something.

A few of the patrons might even pay attention to the comedians!

Nah. Too much pressure.

So I am going on tonight, dammit, even if I have already hacked up three lungs.

---

Speaking of which….

Got the call from the doctor’s office saying they wanted me to come in to discuss my test results with me.

Like I have said before, this is pretty much the older adult equivalent of being called into the principal’s office. You get that same feeling of fear, guilt, and paranoia.

“Oh god, what did I do…. well I haven’t been watching my carbs like I was supposed to, and I guess I have been drinking a lot lately…. oh, and I haven’t used the exercise bike in weeks…. god,what was I thinking?”.

Because you know it’s got to be something bad. They never ask you to come into the office when it’s good news.

“Well, Mister Bertrand, your test results are in and I must say, they are fantastic. Best test results I have ever seen. In fact, we only called you in here today to prove to my staff that you’re a real person. Oh, and the people from Guiness insisted. ”

So I have an appointment at 3:45 pm today. Hopefully, Joe will be back from his own appointment in time to drive me.

If not, I will cab it there and back because there is no way I am waiting for a bus outside in cold grey wet weather like we are getting right now.

That would put me back in the hospital for pneumonia for sure.

Well, that’s it for now. Wish me luck in both things.

More after the break.

---

I am back, post comedy and post doctor’s appointment.

That fucking doctor’s appointment. Sigh.

So there I am, going through my test results with my doctor, patiently waiting for him to get to the part where he tells me what the fuck is wrong with me.

And then I realize…. that’s not where we are headed. He thinks all I am there to do is go over the test results with him. He has completely fucking forgotten why he ordered the god damned tests in the first place.

So then it’s up to me to remind him. And he is, of course, totally surprised. He writes me (well, prints me) a prescription for Azithromycin and flees the room.

This kind of shit is why I have trust issues, people.

Doctors are supposed to be trustworthy authority figures. They are supposed to look out for their patients’ interests. They are supposed to be on the ball. They are supposed to be competent. They are suppose to be very, very smart.

It should not be up to me to do their damned jobs for them.

I could have looked over the test results myself, from home. It doesn’t take a fucking medical degree to read where it says what range the result should be in if the patient is healthy and then says “Hey, this one is outside of that. ”

What I want and need is a goddamned diagnosis. What the hell is wrong with me and what the hell are we going to do about it? It’s your job to know!

Instead, the universe once more proved that I can’t trust anybody to be competent and composed and sensible or even interested in my wellbeing and I have to suspect failure and betrayal at all possible points because even in the doctor’s office, I am the smartest guy in the room, and everyone else is a half-blind idiot.

You might say I am a tad bitter about all this.

Comedy came and went. I am still struggling to connect what I think I am going to do when I get up there to what I actually do when I get up there.

Somehow, when I actually step up to the mic, all my grandiose ideas about how this time I am going to try to be less formal and more chatty go WHOOSH out of my brain and I end up doing my stuff half dazed.

I know I can do better. I know I am not even using one percent of my talent. I know that I have what it takes to light up that crowd and keep them laughing.

The trick is somehow keeping all that in my mind when the spotlight hits me and I am doing my best just to keep ahead of the panic.

Oh well. The more I do it, the more relaxed I will be up there.

It’s all just a matter of practice. I just have to keep going up there week after week.

Oh. And by the way, we’ll be off for two weeks for the holidays.

God damn it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been feeling particularly pointless lately.

Like, seriously… what the fuck is the point of my life. All I do is play video games all day. That accomplishes exactly nothing.

And yet, I am afraid to even think about stopping. That’s how addictions work. Even if part of you wants to flee them, the rest of you is far too scared of the world outside the addiction to make any serious escape plans.

And like I have said before in this space, I remember the alternative. Say what you want about my video game based life, at least I do not dread my life any more. I no longer feel the terrible weight of all those empty hours to fill. I don’t feel like my life is this vast sucking void any more.

I typed that as “a vast sucking avoid” the first time.

Man, that’s got to mean something.

So video games as a hobby is the perfect thing for filling all those empty hours. I can play games for as many hours as I like, more or less. Any spare time I have is fed to the highly agreeable demon of my video game addiction and in return my time gets filled and I am too busy and engaged and happy to be anxious or depressed.

It’s a pretty sweet deal in terms of mere survival. I get through life with very little in the way of pain (except for my health issues, which are mounting) and all it costs me is a little money for a new game now and then.

But it’s not enough. It can never be enough. I want more.

I want to get things for myself. I want to earn money and prove to myself that I can be more than a mildly amusing liability to the world. I want to stop being a burden on others and be able to stand on my own two feet, with nothing to be ashamed of.

I am still very ashamed of being nonproductive. It hasn’t gone away.

I want to project my will, my power, my talent, and my agency in the world. I am sick and tired of being so fucking passive and I want to be able to go get things I want and thereby pursue my own happiness for a change.

I want to express myself instead of being this moribund depository of pointless potential. I could do some truly amazing things in this world if I could only escape my own gravity well. I am a wizard, damn it, and could change the world with my wit and my words and my will if I wasn’t adrift in the doldrums of depression.

I want to show the world just how fucking amazing a creature I am, whatever the hell I am. I am a bright and shining star, and I want to shine so bright the whole world can bask in my glow.

I want out, god damn it.

But depression just keeps pulling me back in.

---

Walls within walls

It started with Raymond.

Raymond is one of the security guards who works the front desk in the evening in my apartment building. That means I see him on the way in or out on those rare occasions when I am not leaving or returning inside someone’s car.

He seems like a nice enough fellow.

But I have….issues.

So I have not spoken to him much. It used to be back in saner times, that I would be with Felicity when I went past. Felicity would stop and have a bit of a chat with him. I would hang around the periphery not saying anything, but probably radiating impatience on an empathic level.

From this, I imagine Raymond concluded that I hated him. Or thought I was better than him. Or something like that.

And then later, when I would be passing him by myself, I still did not say anything I just slunk past without making eye contact.

This presumably reinforced his conclusion that I am an asshole.

But of course, that’s not true. It just looks that way because it is hard to tell at a glance what is genuine aloofness and disdain and what is actually painful awkwardness.

I am terribly, terrible shy. Got social anxiety up the wazoo. This has caused a lot of people to think I thought I was better than them, hated them, thought they were beneath me, and all that jazz.

And really, if you greet someone and they don’t even acknowledge you, what other conclusion can you come to?

How are you to know I didn’t reply because I was paralyzed by social anxiety? Or that I genuinely did not hear you because I was all wrapped up in my own little world?

Back to Raymond. Recently I have made progress : I now greet him on the way through the lobby of our building.

Big deal, he probably thinks, given how sullen his reactions to my greeting are. So now he gives me a big friendly hello. He still doesn’t even slow down for me.

If only he knew what those friendly greetings cost me. Every one of them takes a toll on me because in order to do even that tiny bit requires me to force the portcullis of my inner castle open for a second and man, that fucker is heavy.

It sounds crazy (and it is), but it feels like I am ripping a bullet out of my gut every time.

And it makes me realize just how thick and impenetrable my defenses really are. No wonder everything seems so faint and far away. No wonder I feel like my only source of illumination and warmth and life is the light of a dying star. No wonder I am so cold and so lonely and so painfully isolated even in a crowd.

I raised the walls. And I will be the one to knock’m down.

And I will knock down the walls behind the walls, and the walls behind those, and so forth and so on, walls within walls, until I escape through the center of the maze.

Ya gotta get in to get out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just saw a Facebook ad for “history photos”.

Not historical photos. Photos of the concept of history.

That sounds impressive, but actually, they just repeat themselves.

---

Young person : Oh my god, this thing that is happening now is so important! I am sure nothing this important has ever happened before!

Old person : Nope. Seen it before. Twice, actually.

Young person : That’s IMPOSSIBLE! This thing is so NEW and EXCITING and NOW, not like that boring stuff in the history books!

Old person : That “boring stuff” was new and exciting and now when it happened too. And I was as excited about it as you are at the time. Face it, kid, you’re living in history right now. Some day, this thing you’re all hyped up about will be just another thing in the history books and you’ll be the one trying to convince a young person that history is just the exciting stuff from years gone by.

Young person : You just don’t UNDERSTAND! *dramatic exit*

Old person (to himself) : Oh well, I didn’t listen when I was his age either.

---

Everything cycles, history included. Western thought can’t handle the cyclical because it seems to deny progress.

If everything is going to just keep repeating ad infinitum, then what’s the point?

And I think we suffer from this inability to handle cycles in subtle ways. We see the news repeat itself and loudly declare there to be no such thing as progress. We get into relationships and try to skip steps instead of letting things unfold naturally. We see the stages people go through as they age all around us and yet are somehow surprised when those exact same things happen to us.

As patient readers know, I see time as a kind of spiral staircase where you have to go around and around in a circle in order to ascend.

Best of both worlds, sorta kinda.

---

I’m clearly in some weird sort of mood right now.

Sort of softly alienated, but not in a bad way.

Just seeing things from a strange angle right now, and slightly out of phase with reality.

Moreso than usual, that is.

Maybe this is just a between-phase as I slowly and majestically turn into someone new.

I could live with that.

---

I still wonder what the hell I am sometimes.

Not a normal question, I admit. Most people – sane people – wonder who they are, not what they are.

But I am such a strange bird that “who” does not seem sufficient. I’ve never met anyone quite like me. My point of view is quite bizarre compared to the mainstream, I have way more brainpower than I know what to do with, and my attempts to connect with my fellow naked beach apes are often not just failures but alienating failures.

I am not quite of this world.

And were I not so solidly sensible and pragmatic a person, I might be one of those people who deals with their own strangeness by decided they are “really” something other than a human being on the inside.

I am guessing I would imagine myself to be some kind of alien. Or perhaps something more supernatural, like a nephilim, or a houri.

But alas, no, I am stuck with the reality that I am just a messed up human. A broken person who did not get nearly enough of the right emotional nutrients during his formative years and therefore grew up stunted and strange.

And that’s the ugly truth of it all.

---

Feeling cold and lonely and disconnected.

And trying to deal with the coming of Xmas rationally and sensibly. It feels like it’s coming at me at runaway freight train speeds and yet it’s still more than a week away and I really have very little to do before it so what’s the big deal?

It’s really got me thinking about this whole tendency to freeze up, deer in headlights style, when I feel stressed.

On one level, it fits neatly into my thoughts about how there are people who react to danger by fighting, others by fleeing, and still others by freezing up.

All of these have the potential to be the right response but when exaggerated by serious mental health issues they all become major liabilities.

I would describe myself as a “run and hide” type. Flee then freeze. Picture a caveman running away from a wolf at full speed then, once he feels like he has a big enough lead, diving behind a bush and hiding there, not moving a muscle.

But there’s another dirtier aspect to being a deer in the headlights : freezing up and letting life run me over means I never have to make the decision to act.

The choice is taken away from me and all I have to do is do nothing.

I have realized recently that simply deciding to act is extremely difficult for me. It is a manifestation of executive dysfunction, and it has a huge impact on my life.

Throughout my life, I have avoided having to choose whenever I could. When I couldn’t, I have given away that agency to random factors, i.e., if the next song on the radio is by a female artist, I will do A, and if not. B.

I have done a lot of variations on that one, especially when I was younger.

But what is the problem? Why do I hate choosing so much? It’s certainly not a cognitive issue – I am hella smart and have all the brainpower I need to figure shit out.

The problem is emotional. There is a lack of something vital – I want to say “backbone” – that makes it very hard for me to choose to do something.

And there’s just plain fear, too. I suppose it would be accurate to say that I have such a deep fear of doing the wrong thing that it keeps me from doing anything – even in situations where doing nothing is the wrong decision.

Because I know that when you choose not to choose, you are making a choice.

And yet, doing nothing still feels way safer.

Well, not even I claim to make sense all the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just recently began to remember scraps and moments from my dreams.

And I am quite happy about it. Means my conscious and subconscious minds are communicating with one another, albeit with less than crystal clarity.

But I remember dreaming that I was in front of an audience at a lectern – something I dream and daydream of quite a lot. And I was explaining to the audience that I was an Acadian, which was a kind of French Canadian.

I then continued the lecture in French.

In my dreams, I can totally speak French.

I also remember something where I was going to do something I thought to be devastatingly clever that would let me completely avoid a terrible situation and throw the bad guys for a loop, but in involved me having to sneak out a door, hit the pavement and run as fast as I could somewhere.

And I was loving it. This was a kickass adventure and it was all started by me being clever as hell and doing something that I knew nobody would see coming and leave the forces of evil in a state of scrumptious disarray.

So basically, I was in a state of Peak Fox. If I ever get around to actually writing all the Fruvous adventures I have floating around in my head, that sort of thing will figure prominently and he gets himself into trouble and then escapes said trouble in ways that end up leading him into even bigger trouble.

And that’s exactly the way he likes it.

---

Hello there, sleep

I have finally decided that sleep is okay by me.

I will stop fighting it, I will stop railing against spending the whole day asleep. I will even try to learn to be cool about how fucked up it makes me feel sometimes.

If i end up sleeping all day, so what? All I was going to do is play a goddamned video game all that time, so nothing of substance or worth is lost.

Well, except the bullshit sense of progress and productivity games give. I need to reject that shit and go for actual accomplishments.

Sleep, at least, accomplishes something. It rests the body and lets the mind process the contents of our medium term memory in order to figure out what goes into long term memory. In doing so, it clears out the medium term memory and releases its resources back into the common pool.

That’s such a “me” way of explaining it!

When you don’t get enough decent quality sleep, your medium term memory fills up and then starts taking resources from your conscious mind in order to store new experiences at the cost of making you progressively stupider from the drain to your conscious mind’s resources.

Let that go on long enough and just to maintain the integrity of the information you still have not processed, the brain has to enforce microsleeps where you fall asleep for a few seconds and your brain gets a tiny bit of dreaming done.

So in conclusion…. um… sleep good. Much better than play video games.

I swear I was going somewhere totally different with this.

More after the break.

---

Back after FRED.

Things have been…. not good lately.

And it’s not just the flu-ish stuff I have already talked about. That sucks plenty, but it has also set off my IBS and so now I have to deal with THAT, too.

Hey kids! Did you know that stress makes IBS symptom worse? And do you know what is really fucking stressful? IBS SYMPTOMS.

Isn’t that just one big wacky buttload of fun, kids?

It also means that when I am emotionally distressed, IBS shows up to pile on and make everything that much worse!

Yes kiddies, my body punishes me for suffering with more suffering!

Wow, I must have been some piece of work in a previous life to deserve that, am I right kids? Huh? Do you GET IT, KIDS?

Somewhere inside me there is a VERY angry clown just screaming and screaming at the people passing his cell about what a bunch of fucking idiots they are and how he’s glad they are suffering the consequences of their own refusal to THINK and cackling and jumping up and down singing “because you’re too stuuuuupid!”.

He’s kind of bitter.

I’ve been pondering the idea of a dark god lately. Note the lower case g. This would be a god who starts off as your nemesis but eventually becomes your friend once you realize that he opposed you in ways carefully calculated to make you strong and force you to work through a lot of your issues instead of letting them fester.

I could see myself playing that sort of role in someone’s life. It’s not a role I would choose. but it might be the role I assign to myself if I think it is the only way I can help someone make it to the next level of consciousness.

That seems to be something I have a natural urge to do – help people level up their mind. To guide them in expressing all their dark bullshit, as torturous as that can be, so they can be rid of it and move on with their life.

Maybe that’s a trickster thing. Tricks, traps, puzzles, mazes, games, and things far darker that cut right to heart of your pain and lance it like a boil.

So in this sense, dark does not mean evil. It just means….; well. dark. Unpleasant. Ugly. Shadowy. Painful. Transcendence through the kind of deep suffering that is like your own personal Hell but leaves you stronger, happier, and above all cleaner in the end.

That kind of darkness has no place in mainstream culture. There are the forces of light and good and happiness and the forces of darkness and evil and misery, and that is that. No good can come from dark things.

But I see the beauty of dark things.

And I see the good they can do once you accept that sometimes things have to get a lot worse before they get better, and that the person who refuses to do you any harm might just be the one who is holding you back by keeping you from the real cure.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go lay down in the dark.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow./

Feeling flippant and silly and rude.

So, whatever, hambone. Fuck off.

Definitively no word from my doctor about what the ever loving fuck is wrong with me. Never got around to calling about it. So now I have to wait until Monday at the soonest to get some kind of a clue-in.

In the meantime, my nose runs, my chest feels heavy, my throat is dry and raw and scratchy, my joints are stuff, and I feel cold a lot.

Pretty sure this is a preview of what it is like to be old. Perhaps my future self sent this as a warning.

If so, he honestly should have known better.

Takes more than this to make me smarten up.

---

Proto-idea for a comedy : a man who acts exactly like a woman (but is still straight) meets the woman who acts just like a man (but is straight).

The problem is that I don’t know how to set up why these people act like the opposite gender. I suppose it doesn’t necessarily need a setup – that could just be their personalities, no explanation needed.

But that doesn’t seem right. It needs something more. Something to firmly support the levels of absurdity and gender issue exploration I would want to do.

Oooh, you could do cross-gender casting. Have the man who acts exactly like a woman be played by a woman, and vice versa.

Nah. Why make things more complicated.

It could be some sort of wacky science fiction premise. Some sort of crazy new therapy that is supposed to “unlock your (opposite gender) side” and works all too well.

Yeah, okay, that works. And our star crossed lovers are perfectly normal people^[1] who have never met before and who volunteered for the experiment on a whim.

It would start off light and silly with common observations and the comedy of “wrong gender performance” plus having fun gender flipping rom com tropes, but eventually get into the deeper stuff about how society punishes gender inappropriate behaviour and all those double standards that make it so what is acceptable for one gender is offensive in the other and how much that sucks.

All of this would be within the context of the standard rom com structure. They meet, they fall in love, something threatens said love, they part, they come back together.

It’s one of those stories endlessly retold because something about it just plain works for people. Classic story structures are like that.

It could be loads of fun for the actors playing the couple, of course. I’ve seen some men do the “acting like women” thing extremely well but I have never seen a woman act like a man in a way that seemed convincing to me.

Might simply be that women resist that role because they have never seen it in pop culture, whereas comedy has loads of men playing women for big laughs.

Food for thought. I shall ponder anon.

More after the break.

---

These afternoon naps are gonna kill me.

Two days in a row now, I go to take a short nap at 4 pm or so and end up sleeping for four plus hours and wake up thoroughly crispy fried and zombified.

So I have all the usual post sleep bullshit going on : dizziness, disorientation, confusion, and all the rest.

Right now, my head is so messed up right now that I barely know my own name.

It’s…. Mickey, right? Beauce I love Disney so much? And I’m a mouse?

All I really want to do right now is go the fuck back to sleep. But I have to blog and a REALLY need to eat, and the pizza is on its way so sleeping is highly contra-indicated.

Luckily, I am drinking Diet Coke, so there’s a chance that I have the Caffeine Cavalry riding the rescue just in the nick of time.

Really makes me wish I had skipped that fucking nap.

Because I felt fine laying down. I wasn’t even sleepy. I just thought I needed a rest from all the Fallout New Vegas I’d been playing.

My subconscious mind did all the rest. That sneaky son of a bitch.

I guess it’s got to be sneaky, though, to get past my ever vigilant superego.

I think I am going ot get up and take a little walk around the apartment in order to wake myself up some.

More after bonus break.

---

Feeling more alive and awake now.

I’m pretty sure I am on Earth, but it might still be Mars and at any second, my Earth reality will come apart at the seams in an eye-poppingly visual way that would make the ghost of Philip K. Dick pop a stiffy.

That would be neat.

What next. I know, I will randomly post some furry porn.

And the fox is like, “I love you, huge dragon cock!”.

Hadn’t done that in a while. It’s kind of fun.

Especially writing the caption.

---

Got me some pizza. Tonight, all I wanted was a good ol’ pepperoni pizza, also known as the “default pizza”. Usually, I go for something fancier, but I am way too tied for that right now and so I went int the opposite direction.

And you know what? It’s pretty damned tasty.

Sometimes the simplest things are best.

---

(don’t worry, I am not suicidal, these are just some morbid thoughts)

Sometimes the urge to die is just the urge to get away for a while.

It’s always about escape. Getting away from the pain, even briefly. The general response of a wounded animal to pain it can’t avoid is despair.

The animal lays down somewhere safe and recuperates.

Humans can sense the future, though. So we can see a future filled with nothing but pain. And so we can be proactive about it.

It makes sense, in a terrible way.

There’s always one final way to escape your inner predator.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still no word from the doctor’s office. I am probably going to call later today. I really want to know what the ever loving fuck is wrong with me.

Haven’t had any more big chills, knock on metaphorical wood. But I can see now that I have been experiencing petit mal versions of it ever since this whole thing started, I I just chalked them up to there being a draft or something.

Now I know better, and will be watching for more of them.

But not too closely. The last thing I need right now is to trigger my hypochondria.

Step by step, day by day, ;line by line.

Anyhow, here’s a video I have been watching.

I love that particular subject because, for a guy who does not believe in magic and considers himself a rational materialist, I have surprisingly strong intuition.

Hence the N in INTJ.

For all of my life, I have gotten “feelings” about people and places. I am quite sensitive to what are generally known as “vibes” and I trust my intuition on most things.

The difference between me and some New Age woowoo type person is that I don’t think any of it has anything to do with mysticism or religion or “the other side”. I don’t think I am picking up any special sort of energy (except, perhaps, electromagnetism), I don’t believe in past lives, and I definitely don’t think I am tapping into the cosmic umwelt.

My intuition, in my view, is simply the product of my unconscious mind processing and integrating information on a far, far deeper and more complex level than my conscious mind could ever hope for, and then outputting the result directly into my consciousness.

I can almost always examine the intuition and figure out what went into it on a conscious level and hence verify it.

This verification then guides the next thing I ask my subconscious mind to work on, and so forth and so on, reason and intuition working hand in hand.

Seems to work quite well, in my experience.

I suppose that my openness to my own intuition might also explain why I have never felt there was any conflict between my creativity and my scientific and logical rigor.

To me, they are the same thing, probably because they are both very “me”. I recognize that, at least on paper, my intensely analytical side and my creative, wacky side are different parts of me, but they work together so closely that the distinction between the two seems academic at best.

Usually with me, intuition leads and reason follows. That’s as it should be as our unconscious mind is far more powerful than our conscious minds.

In fact, I have often said that the conscious mind is merely the interface through which we access and use the subconscious mind.

So it’s almost like my subconscious mind is some kind of enigmatic deity and my conscious mind is the priest class dedicated to interpreting its mutterings.

I find that idea rather pleasing.

And rather humorous too, come to think of it.

I picture my deity as being an eagle-headed Egyptian style god with a forked tongue like a snake and gesturing mysteriously as it intones its declarations in a deep monotone.

Deity : The false shadows of the noontime apocalypse conceal nothing but the doom that devours all the serpents of the hollow moon in France.

Couple : What does that mean?

Priest : It’s a boy!

Couple cheers and celebrates.

That was fun to write. I should vent my weirdness directly onto the page more often.

More after the break.

---

The beginning of the end

I feel tired and sick and cold and slightly bruised all over. My joints are stiff and my head hurts and I get random stabbing pains in my feet.

I, as my Dad would say, am one hurtin’ unit, and it has me thinking morbid thoughts.

Because this could be it, you know. The beginning of the end. I might have taken my first step onto the slip n’ slide that ends in my sloppy and pathetic death.

And along the way, my life will just get worse and worse as my health issues gang up on me and I end up in the hospital, full of tubes and unable to move and completely and helplessly miserable for the rest of my days.

I don’t want to go there.

But I doubt I will be able to prevent it, either.

Oh, there might be the occasional good period. Times when I am home and relatively healthy and taking care of myself properly because I have the memory of my most recent battle with illness to keep me motivated to improve.

But it won’t last. It never does. And the minute my determination falters, I will slip back into the old unhealthy patterns again, and before you know it, I am back at square 1.

Actually, make that square -1, because I will be worse off than before.

I wish there was somewhere I could go where they rigidly control my diet and make me exercise (or at least, make it worth my while to exercise) and basically take my freedom away until such time as I am strong enough to take care of myself on my own.

Because it’s clear to me that I can’t do it. There is something very broken inside me that makes seemingly easy things impossible for me to do. There is a great and terrible sea of sadness within me and all my motivations drown there.

I try to motivate myself and instead of inspiration I get cold wet paralysis that makes me feel like part of my brain has frozen in place. And it won’t unfreeze till I give up trying to force the issue of my motivation.

I am dead on the inside, patient readers.

And soon, I may die of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Another good session today. One more and I will feel like I have sufficient evidence to declare that showing up grumpy works. \

This time, I deliberately got myself worked up on the way over. Nothing particularly annoying happened, I just got myself feeling pumped up and feisty.

Turns out, the annoying stuff would come AFTER therapy.

(Skip this next bit, Julian)

---

Before therapy. Julian told me he would be waiting in the waiting room of my therapist’s office, or in the parking lot.

After therapy, I come out – no Julian.

Immediately I felt abandoned, forgotten about, abused, and neglected. I had been triggered good. It took some doing to fight all that back and remember that he probably had Joe’s phone on him, and called him, and he told me he would be back in five.

It was more like ten, but whatever.

I was pretty annoyed with him for this slip-up, but did not feel like it was worth fighting for, so I left it behind me.

Um, except for now. When I am blogging about it.

In my defense, this is how I process my emotions.

---

You can come back now, Julian. I am not mad and I forgive you. It was just a silly error that happened to trigger my issues.

In the session, I vented about a lot of stuff that needed venting. Like how I basically raised myself because nobody thought I was worth any time, energy, effort, or thought and so I grew up without any kind of nurturing, care, or guidance.

And so I grew up sad. I realized that, apart from the two years I went to UPEI in the early Nineties, I have been miserable my entire life. I was depressed on the first day of elementary school and I was depressed on the last day of high school and the whole time I was in the regular school system, I was depressed.

And I have been depressed ever since my parents selfishly took my brother and I out of college. For a while, I was so depressed it damn near killed me.

And it’s been nothing but depression ever since. The location changed but the disease remained the same.

So I have no idea what it is like to actually enjoy life. To look forward to the next day. ro have a sense of purpose and meaning. To feel like I have earned my place in society. To feel romantic love, or even sincere and mutual lust.

At my happiest, I have viewed life as something to endure. My life is something I survive on a day to day business. Occasionally, a shadow lifts, and I feel somewhat sort of a little okay for a while.

But for the most part, I am simply trying to get through life with as little pain as I can. The only possible destination is death and that is by default.

I have suffered in the shadows for so very long.

It is all I have ever known.

More after the break.

---

The coldest shadow, revisited

So um…,. this happened.

I was waking up from a nap when I suddenly felt this intense chill.

It was like nothing I have ever felt before. It was horrible and terrifying and I am really starting to worry about myself.

And it was definitely coming from the inside. The room was perfectly warm and I didn’t feel cold on the surface at all.

But deep inside, it was an arctic nightmare. It seemed to be centered on the core of my chest but I felt it all through my torso. A terrible coldness radiating and twisting like a tornado deep inside me.

And it’s been five hours, and it’s still not entirely gone. I still feel cold in the core of my chest. I still feel like I want to barf up an icicle and be rid of this horrid feeling.

Add this to the stiffness in my joints and the fatigue and the feeling of frailness and all my other symptoms, and it really seems like i have some old timey illness that people used to die off in the bad old days.

It sure as fuck isn’t a common cold, I can tell you that.

So now I am even more keenly anticipating hearing from my doctor about what the ever loving hell is happening to me.

On the plus side, pretty sure it ain’t psychosomatic (attic insane). No way my subconscious could cook up symptoms like these. Symptoms that are not like anything I have experienced before in my life. Like joint stiffness and that awful, awful chill.

It took a while for the initial chill to thaw out, and like I have said, it is still not entirely gone. At first, I just lay there in bed not knowing what the hell was going on. But eventually, I got up and did, what else, played Fallout New Vegas in order to distract myself so I could calm down.

The DLC has been well worth the money so far. I’ve played through the quest called Old World Blues and it was fantastic. Bursting with creativity and originality and personality and other things I love that end in Y.

And all with this bizarre and wonderful off-kilter sense of humor. For example, your home in that module is a place called The Sink (dunno why) and each appliance has its own hilarious AI personality.

So there’s a toaster that talks like a hyped up psycho bro-soldier and wants to burn the whole world but can only make toast. And then there’s Muggy, a VERY high strung and overwrought little robot whose entire existence is dedicated to cleaning coffee mugs and is tormented by the absurdity of his own existence.

Poor little guy. I make sure to bring him coffee mugs now and then so he can experience (and resent) the bliss of cleaning them.

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. I am currently doing another of the DLC modules, Honest Hearts, and it’s perfectly fine but can’t help but pale in comparison.

Think I will get back to it now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I may have spoken about this here before. If so, I apologize. But I feel the need to organize and express myself on the subject right now.

Basically, these are the thoughts that want out right now.

The fundamental truth is that talent is not fair. It’s not fair that someone who has worked very hard for years to master their specialty can be outshone by some naturally talented motherfucker like me for whom it is barely even a thing.

As patient readers know. this came to a head when I was in university with my brother in the early Nineties. We ended up in the same course together, and that was not a good thing, in retrospect.

Because then he got to see me in action, so to speak. He would work and study incredibly hard and I would do my usual absolutely nothing and I would still get a higher mark on the test.

Galling, to say the least. My brother got quite angry with me. At the time it seemed unfair, and I suppose it still is.

After all, it’s not like I did it on purpose just to hurt him. I was just me being me.

But I totally understand. Watching his little brother – you know, that dingus he’s repeatedly had to stop from walking into traffic absentmindedly – do better than him without effort must have been horrible for him.

And it must have been the same (though not as bad) for all the keener kids in every class I have ever taken (save the few where I crashed and burned). To see this absolute mess of a person who can barely keep this pants up and often doesn’t seem to know what planet he is on consistently do better than you when you work your butt off must seem like the height of injustice.

The fulcrum of the phenomenon is the labour theory of value. The easiest and most natural way for humans to assign value is via labour. That means that effort is rewarded proportionally to its degree.

That’s why we perpetually tell ourselves people got ahead via “hard work” even when that is patently and obviously untrue.

To face reality on that issue would be devastating.

And talent works the same way. I did absolutely nothing to “earn” my gifts. I have always found school incredibly easy. There was never a time when I worried about tests or sweated over assignments.

I forgot about the test until it was placed in front of me? Still got an A.

I turned in first drafts of assignments. Still got an A.

I pointed out an error the teacher had made and lightning completely failed to strike me dead on the spot. And I still got an A.

So a lot of people probably hated my guts. And yet, I didn’t do anything wrong. I just used my gifts like anyone else.

My gifts just happened to be a lot bigger than most.

And they still are.

And that just plain isn’t fair.

More after the break.

---

Listen up – Mother Earth will be fine.

Really. We humans are good at fucking things up, but nature adapts. Life persists. There’s been lots of mass extinctions that nearly wiped out life on earth, but life is tenacious, so every time it came back stronger than ever.

And the critters? They will be fine too, in the long run. Sure, we have wiped out whole species with the stroke of a pen, but the critters and the plants and the weird extremeophile critters that aren’t anything we recognize will survive whatever we do to their environments in one form or another.

So don’t worry about the Earth and the plants and the trees and the animals. They will survive our bullshit just fine.

We, however, might be totally fucked.

We’re the biggest threat to ourselves humanity has ever known. As long as we let assholes like the Koch brothers corrupt our politics and hence our policies, we will continue to shit where we eat as a species and if modern civilization goes down the drain as a result, we will only have ourselves to blame.

And when out children and our grandchildren get tired of our stories about how good things used to be and turn to us and ask, “Why did you let it happen? Why weren’t you doing everything you could to stop it?”, what will we say?

Because I guarantee you, whatever we say, it won’t be enough.

More after a surprise second break.

---

I am having a hell of a hard time deciding whether or not to do comedy tonight.

On the one hand, I feel awful. Tired, sore, stiff, weak, and it feels like my chest is full of cold suet pudding.

Don’t look it up. It’s awful.

Logically and sensibly, I should stay the fuck home to rest and recuperate. The weather outside is truly evil, with that cold drizzling rain that sucks the heat from your bones. Even healthy people should think twice before going out in all that.

But god damn it, I don’t want to miss a chance to perform. These sorts of things only become ingrained habits and the new normal via repetition and I really don’t want to lose the momentum I have been building.

And there’s something truly noble about performing despite being sick. It could make for a really great anecdote some day.

And if I end up getting pneumonia as a result, that would make it….fairly stupid. Still noble, but also stupid.

So I don’t know.

Of course the Forces of Evil in my mind are like “No, stay home, where it’s safe and warm and we have you all to ourselves! *high pitched evil laughter*”.

And that makes me suspicious of myself again.

But there is only so much doubt I can take. Past a certain point, I just have to trust that what I am feeling is real and act accordingly.

And that means I am definitely not going on stage tonight.

Probably. Well, maybe.

Honestly, I have no fucking idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.