Rescheduled my doctor’s appointment. Now it’s set for tomorrow at 2:30 pm.

Originally, it was at 2:15 pm today, the 10th of December. But I woke up today feeling sicker than yesterday and that made the prospect of taking the bus to the doctor seem like a bad risk.

It’s not the bus, it’s the waiting outside in the cold for the bus that worried me.

So, ironically, I was too sick to go to the doctor. Hopefully, Joe will be able to drive me there n’ back. He had a conflicting doctor’s appointment today.

I feel pretty out of it at the moment. Took my sleepytime pills this morning. Good for me. It had been a while.

And so far, no radical deep sleep that leaves me feeling all fucked up. Just some trouble concentrating and a bit of a disconnected, “my head is a balloon” feeling.

It ain’t that bad.

---

So I done fucked up again.

This time I forgot to work Xmas shopping into my budget and my plans, so now I am going to have to tapdance a bit to get my shopping done.

It’s no big deal, it just bugs me that I was so clueless and careless. Normally I am smarter than that.

But well. executive dysfunction is a bitch. I have been more or less ignoring Xmas as it lurches towards us, and it took this long for the option paralysis inherent in the issue to thaw to the point where it became a real thing with which I was attempting to cope.

Oh well, it will all work out fine. Just a little bump on the road.

I feel dumb but it will pass.

It always does.

---

Let’s talk about Delilah.

It started when I was getting my ass kicked repeatedly by a large number of Fiends (gang of bandits, sadly, not demons) and no matter what I did , having that many people after me and shooting at me was just plain more than I can handle.

So I looked up companion mods, as I never seem to run across any in the game proper. I had already tried the top rated one, Willow, and she was cool and good in a fight, but I have been there, done that for enough time that it was time to move on.

So I got Delilah. On paper, she seemed fabulous. A young amateur healer looking to work her way up to being a real desert MD? Someone to patch me up after every fight? Sounds pretty good to me.

But then I installed her and her speech was atrocious.

I was not entirely surprised. The words “fully voiced” in a mod’s description have started to fill me with dread because of things like this.

Because ya know, these things aren’t being “fully voiced” by professional actors. It’s just some nerd or his girlfriend or best bud reluctantly reading words into someones cheapass computer microphone.

And wow does it show with Delilah. Her voice lines are delivered in such a bored and emotionless voice that a monotone would actually have more life to it.

AND it was recorded badly in someone’s closet, at such a low bit rate you could probably scribbling the sound wave down by hand.

So, bye bye, Delilah. Amazing to think of how highly rated that mod was.

I mean, who could put up with THAT?

---

Back again. Man, does it suck to be sick.

Especially the joint stiffness. That… that is new. I move and walk like a little old man now, and for the same reason. Every large movement happens in slow motion, and I feel very frail and vulnerable.

And I could be wrong, but I associate joint stiffness with the more serious sort of infectious disease, not a common chest cold.

Like it doesn’t belong on the list with “cough, sniffle, sore throat, phlegm”, it belongs the list that’s more like “shortness of breath, spontaneous bruising, yellow skin, thick tellow discharge coming from all orifices, some of which now speak. ”

That’s probably just my latent hypochondria talking though. Whatever happens, whatever the doctor says, that is what I will go with.

Otherwise I will descend unto madness again and I never, ever, EVER want to be in that particular hell I was in after I got taken out of college again.

Speaking of my doctor, I am going to take some of the pain and anger generated by being sick and use it to power a willingness to tell Doctor Chao that he is not going to ride roughshod over me again and that this time he is going to sit still and actually listen to what I have to say and give me a well thought out diagnosis instead of just saying whatever it takes to get me out the door fastest so he can work on real patients.

I will even bring up discrimination against the mentally ill (depression), the handicapped (same), and the obese.

I am determined to get proper health care this time and I am in just enough of a cranky mood to get it done, too.

I mean, Doctor Chao seems like a very nice fellow. But they all end up taking advantage of me eventually. They sense that they can rush me and I will be too slow and timid to complain when they speed me out the door so they can treat someone who matters;.

I don’t matter. Or at least, that’s what a lifetime of being treated like I don’t matter has taught me. I’m worthless, I am unimportant, I have a zero priority value, I don’t count, I don’t matter, and quite frankly, shouldn’t even be here.

In the ledger of life, I am a massive liability.

That’s what my emotional programming tells me, and is taking me a very long time to reprogram myself. I still find it very hard to imagine anyone thinking I have value and actually wanting my to be around.

Even though objectively, they sure as heck do.

Maybe I need to learn to truly see myself as others see me.

But I am scared of what I might see.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The kind that leads to feeling overwhelmed.

Because….. because that’s the uh….. joke. Hehe.

(SFX : Audience silence. Someone coughs. A cricket chirps. It’s someone’s ringtone. They apologize and dash out of the venue. )

Anyhow, I am feeling overwhelmed. And I know why.

It’s because one item was added to my week and that is totally throwing off my tender little timetable and triggering me.

The item is Felicity’s performance at the Standup For Mental Health graduation show at Yuk Yuk’s tonight. I am going with her to provide moral support and companionship, and to get me some quality Felicity time.

That’s been in short supply lately because I have not been able to hang out with her and Joe at her parents’ place due to fears of my being infected with something that is causing these attacks of coldness and despair I have been having.

Though come to think of it, I haven’t had one in a week or so. Hmmm.

Anyhow, I need to go see the doctor about it before hangouts recur, and I keep forgetting to make the appointment, and so on.

And the thing is, I have been here before, and I know what is going on.

My depression and anxiety are getting their way and they love it. And all they have to do to keep getting away with it is use their powers to make me forget to phone the doc.

And that’s easy because making phone calls makes me socially anxious anyway so it’s easy to keep putting it off and telling myself I will do it “soon”.

Well enough of that crap. I just made the goddamned appointment. 2:15 pm tomorrow and that will be the goddamned end of it.

See, my “forgetting” was a victory for my issues because it meant I got to go home earlier and thus was basically an excuse for me to give in to my anxiety and scurry back to my filthy little nest here and play video games.

Going to Felicity’s parent’s place is always stressful for me because I feel so out of place there. Her parents are upper middle class respectable types, and have a very nice home, and I’m just this dirty ol mutt who is scared he is going to wreck stuff and so I am always anxious there.

No wonder it makes me want to run and hide.

But I don’t want to keep giving in to that. It’s cost me a lot of high value social time hanging out with Joe and Felicity watching videos and her kitten Charcoal, and that’s not good for me.

I need all the positive (and a little anxious) social time I can get. It’s the cure for what ails me, and so if I want to stop ailing, I need lots of it.

And that means overcoming this reflexive reaction of mine that views anything that cuts into my copious alone time as some kind of dire threat.

Plot twist : I just realized I have a chest cold. My lungs feel heavy and scratchy and my nose is running and I am feeling a little dizzy.

So now I might not be able to go to Felicity’s show with her, and I feel awful about that because I feel like I am being a bad friend.

Plus, after everything I have just said, I’m suspicious of myself. I am pretty sure my subconscious mind is not just manufacturing symptoms to get me out of a somewhat stressful social situation, but I can’t be totally sure.

Man it sucks to be me sometimes.

More after the break.

---

Well I didn’t go. No big surprise there.

And I feel really bad about it. And a lot of that bad feeling is guilt, even though there was nothing I could have done about it.

Would you believe I actually thought about just not telling Felicity that I felt sick? That would have been wildly irresponsible and I would have felt SUPER guilty if I ended up giving her something she then passed on to her parents, but for a minute or two, it seemed like the only way out.

Thankfully, I got over it.

Another part of the bad feeling is disappointment. I was looking forward to the show. I was especially looking forward to being there for Felicity, which is probably a big part of why I feel guilty for not being there even though I can’t.

She’s been so supportive of my getting into standup that I wanted to pay it back so bad.

Speaking of which, I have been pondering what is next for my journey into funnyman land. I feel like I want to go away from the joke-teller style a little and try something a little less formal and a little more chatty.

I think that would maximize my appeal to the audience as well as take me in the direction of developing a unique voice.

Sort of like I am the audience’s gay best friend. Sort of thing.

Like Buddy Cole, but less camp and more intellectual.

Also wondering about going political. On the one hand, I have SO MUCH TO SAY ABOUT POLITICS. And I could do some epic rants. Or I could do it satirical style. And I know my perspective is fresh and unique and I have killer insights.

But, like, everyone is talking about politics these days. And I don’t want to end up being angry and bitter for a living. I especially don’t want to become just another voice howling into the wind of the shitstorm that is modern political life.

So I would have to find some kind of middle ground where I can throw my political speech hand grenades without getting caught in the blast, or ending up leaving comedy entirely and becoming some kind of deranged demagogue.

I just have to remember that no matter where I end up, ALWAYS BE FUNNY.

I think I can probably manage that.

I well talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Boy, have I had a bad time.

It’s been one of those wonderful and educational experiences with tech where you start out with big beautiful plans and end up fighting tooth and nail just to get back to where you started out.

This afternoon, I decided I would install something called Fallout : Tale of Two Wastelands (TTW) on my computer.

It basically merges Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas (an impressive feat) so that you can take one character through both games.

It started, insanely enough from the point of view of now, as a way around a problem I was having getting sexy funtimes to work in Fallout 3 without it crashing. I was reading a threat about the version of a mod called Sexout that is the main mod that allows for sexy funtimes in these games that someone had made for Fallout 3.

At the end of the thread, someone said that you are better off just installing TTW and using the version for Fallout New Vegas, which is more stable, has more features, and is generally way, way better.

Sold! I thought. I will do that.

Historically, this should go down next to statements like “To hell with the icebergs, full speed ahead!” and “Sure, paint the enormous bag of hydrogen with paint more flammable than dry tinder. What could possibly go wrong? “

So I download the thing and I start watching the video (grr) on how to install it.

Mental note : do not install or do anything until you have watched the WHOLE video.

I know this now.

First, I needed clean installs of both games No problem, uninstall and reinstall, takes a while to re-download the game each time and I had to disable all the mods I had on both games but whatevs.

I was riding high on the spirit of endeavor.

Then I tried to install the TTW thing, but it wanted me to have all the DLC for both games and I only had the stuff for Fallout 3.

I looked up how much it would cost me to get the stuff for Fallout New Vegas. $22. Hmmm. I could just barely afford it.

So I hemmed and hawed over it but eventually decided to do it, like I knew I would.

After all, I was now full of not only the spirit of endeavor but that sheer bloody minded determination to finish what I start that occasionally messes me up.

Problem : credit card expired, still don’t have the new one. So the project had to stop until I found the new one, and I could not.

Very frustrating, after building up such a head of steam.

Of course, the moment I ask Joe about it, he pauses for two seconds then uses his Joe Powers to find it in a heartbeat.

He never ceases to amaze me.

So I got the credit card registered over the phone, added to my PayPal, then bought the DLC thing, downloaded it, added it, everything is cool. I try running the installer for TTW again, and this time it goes through.

Then starts converting a jillion audio files to a slightly different format, a process that, even with my modern computer, will take at least six hours.

WTF? Why not just ship those files already converted?

Eventually, I remember there was a quicker version of the same process. It only took an hour and a half!

So all that happens, and I think I must be close to done, but then I click play on the video and the instructions rapidly branch out into dozens of steps, half of which I don’t even understand, and I realize I am quite thoroughly fuck’d.

So after I tried to understand the instructions a few times and utterly failed to do so, I gave it up as a bad job and consoled myself with the fact that I now had a bunch of jazzy cool new DLC quests to do in Fallout New Vegas, which was a better game than Fallout 3 anyhow and way easier to mod.

So I start up a new character in Fallout New Vegas…. but it’s not working quite right. The mouse pointer is missing and there’s this long pause in between the title screen loading and the menu options showing up.

Weird. So I start a new game anyhow, and…. it’s the wrong game. It’s Fallout 3. But with major things wrong with it, like no voice track and missing graphic errors.

And get this : it was still that way after an uninstall and reinstall! And after I had completely uninstalled Fallout 3 AND deleted everything TTW.

This led to a lengthy and profound funk. I was frustrated, angry at myself, and feeling quite lost without a Fallout game to play at ALL.

This seriously clouded my thinking, so it was a while before I thought to Google the problem and how to fix it.

The problem was that TTW had copied all the data files from Fallout 3 to Fallout New Vegas’ data folder, and Fallout New Vegas was loading all of them (hence that weird pause) and trying to using them all at once.

That confused the hell out of it and fucked things up right good.

So I disabled those data files. That did not work. Eventually I learned that you have to go delete the files or it will load them no matter what.

So I did that, and now it works. It loaded normally, I made my typical nerdy sharpshooter type character, drooled over Doc Mitchell some, and stepped out into the wonderful warm wasteland.

After much consternation, frustration, and aggravation, I had managed to fight my way back to where I had started from.

Well, except that now I have a bunch of DLC to play, so, w00t to that.

That means that technically I came out ahead. And I am sure that is exactly how I see it…. AFTER I get some goddamned sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s talk a little more about what is deep down fundamentally wrong with me.

There is a definite hard limit to how close I can be with anyone, or at the very least, how close I have been to anyone.

I think of all the people of the world, the person I have been closest to is my brother Dave. Or my mother. It’s hard to say which is closer, because my tie to my mother is the strongest one in my universe but I have spent a lot more time hanging out with my brother and in many ways we are still remarkably in sync.

But even with my mother, there’s this distance and a sense of detachment. I come from an extremely intellectual family, and while that has resulted in four cracking smart kids, all four of those kids suffer from depression and/or anxiety issues.

So….. there’s that.

So there’s the distance our intellectualism begat. We were never a family that dealt well with sticky emotional issues well. In that, we’re as emotionally repressed as millions of other Canadian households. We are great talkers and thinkers, but the emotions are not usually on display, let alone discussed.

I get the feeling that problem goes deeper in me than I can even grasp at that point. All that bright but cold intellectualism. Sigh.

Then there’s the additional detachment from my birth order issues. I was left all alone a lot of the time because my siblings had their own groups of friends and I had none. So in that sense, there was nobody to get close to till I got my first group of friends in Grade Six. Trevor and Kevin.

We bonded over Kiss.

And then there’s the big one, the detachment that came from having been raped. When I took my mind away and told myself it wasn’t happening in self defense, it did severe damage to my connection with reality, especially on an emotional level.

That’s the big one, I imagine. That’s the massive wound that is so hard to heal. That’s the one that made me so hard to get close to even if someone wanted to. That’s what made me such a strange child coming from my own weird little dimension.

But the fact that I was so articulate and friendly disguised – and disguises – that fact from people. Were I overtly hostile and antisocial, people would know how to deal with me and that would form a stable basis for connection with the world.

Maybe not the easiest connection. But connection nonetheless.

But I am not antisocial. In fact, I give all the appearance of being present and friendly and cute and sweet and entertaining and funny and all those good things.

But I am not really there. Or rather, I am there and not there at the same time, like I deal with the world via hologram.

It seems like I am really there, even to myself. But I am not. I am always dealing with things through a projection of myself.

The very concept of actually being completely present chills me to the bone.

It’s so very cold in this here shadow.

More on this after the break.

---

I feel like I have more to say about my broken self, but it’s not coming to me.

But I want to keep plugging away at it because I know, deep down, that this is big and if I can shift it, I will make a lot of progress.

Oh, I remember something : I think other people can sense the wrongness in me. But because I give good hologram, they can’t really put their finger on it. I seem like a nice, friendly, cheerful guy, but there’s just something…. off about me.

That’s because, despite my best efforts, the illusion is not perfect. My overt vibe is good but the undervibe has all kinds of nasty shit in it.

Like my anxiety. I want so desperately to be liked and praised and given affection but on the other hand I am extremely afraid of really connecting with people because I know I can’t connect with them without them connecting with me and my deep down depressed brain is sure that if someone connects with me, all the nastiness and bile and really bad stuff that I hide with my hologrammatic skills with come rushing out of me and into the other person and my guilt and shame will be such that I will die.

Or want to, anyhow.

So I hide behind my masks and facets. Everything you see is real but nobody sees everything. Not even my therapist.

Not even me. There are parts of me that I am still hiding from myself. I know it. And so much of me lies dormant, waiting for the spring that has been so long delayed.

I really have no idea who I really am. All I have ever known is my nascent self. I don’t know what it is like to be in a relationship, or have a job, or have a sex life, or do something meaningful and important.

I want to burst into rowdy bloom but that would require a change of situation. I would need to move to someplace sunnier and warmer than the environment which I can provide for myself.

So again : the problem is that I need a lot of help but lack the ability to get that help for myself. I can’t think of anyone that would take on the massive burden of care that I require, and I don’t think I could possibly do it for myself.

And I sure as fuck can’t pay someone to do it.

It’s like those scenes where someone is having a heart attack and they end up dying because they can’t reach the phone to dial 911 for themselves.

That’s how I feel. There might be a world of salvation out there but I will never know because I lack the strength and motive power to find and use it.

It’s all terribly tragic and ironic, I suppose.

I wish that, with all my magic, I had a spell to make myself well.

But I am just a sick wizard who can’t reach the phone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Blogging at 6:11 am because I just had a very weird experience.

Sometimes, depending on how tired I feel, I have a wee bit of a laydown between watching stuff with J&J and getting on the computer to play video games.

Usually, what happens is that I don’t really sleep, I just “zero out” – meaning I lay there with my eyes closed and get part of the way to sleep but mostly just let my stimulation levels drop down all the way to zero.

Hence “zeroing out”.

But this time, I slipped into an extremely deep sleep that has left me feeling extremely fucked up and I guess I must have had my eyes partly open because I woke up with my eyes feeling all grummy and dry and weird.

You know, I meant to type “gummy” not “grummy”, but I am going to leave it because it really conveys the feeling.

So now I feel very alienated and out of sync with reality. I feel like my eyes are trying to go in two different directions like I’m a fucking chameleon and every time I move my head, I feel like I am on a sailing ship with nobody at the wheel.

So the wheel just spins on its own and the ship goes lurching in random directions and everybody on board just clings to whatever is handy.

Sorry if you got that already.

So now I am, as it were, adrift. I honestly don’t know what to do with myself now. These kinds of things leave me feeling a wee bit reluctant to go back to sleep given what sleep just did to me, and yet I doubt I am in any fit mental state to do anything else.

I guess I will just do a little pacing and some breathing exercises to see if I can get myself back on this planet so I can get some decent sleep.

Will be back later.

---

And now, part two of our feature presentation.

I feel better than I did earlier, but to be frank, how I felt earlier set the bar pretty low.

Fun : right before I got up to make lunch, I got very sleepy. So now I am eating while sleepy as fuck.

I sometimes feel like my life is a video game and someone keep fucking with the difficulty settings so that hard things are easy but normal things are hard.

I can perform miracles with my mind but I can’t get eight hours of sleep in a row.

---

It would be in society’s best interest if there was some way for hothouse flowers like myself to find our correct climate, where we can thrive and bloom.

But sadly, there is no remedy for being too weak to make it on your own. If you lack the motive power to get up and find your place in the sun, all you can do is wither and die in the dark. On some level and at some point, you have to be strong enough to uproot yourself and seek a warmer climate, even if it’s just by seeking a new protector.

Makes me wonder how many other stray blossoms like myself there are out there.

There’s probably millions of us.

What a waste of human potential.

But how would you solve it? Send wasted potential inspectors door to door?

---

In many ways, depression is like being in a city under siege. On the one hand, you are successfully keeping the invaders out, but on the other hand, you aren’t getting fresh food and supplies coming in and so everyone is slowly starving to death.

I can’t imagine throwing the gates open to the world at this point in my life. It feels like I would die – the barbarian hordes would overwhelm me and I would be destroyed.

But for all I know, they aren’t even out there any more.

The first step, then, is finding the courage to check.

Ah, there’s always a catch.

---

There is something terribly, terribly wrong with me.

I am broken on a deep and terrifying level. I can feel it so clearly. Something very, very important is missing from me and I feel its absence is a massive, gaping void at the very center of me, and I don’t know if it can ever be repaired.

I have called it my “broken antenna” in the past but that does not convey the depth of the problem. Face it : I never learned to connect with my fellow human beings on anything but a superficial level.

Because of this, the spaces in my soul where socialization and connection should be are instead fill with the icy cold silence.of the interstellar void.

When I was raped at the age of four, a cold steel wall slammed down between me and the world. No love or warmth can penetrate it.

And it’s left me an emotional cripple for almost my entire life. I have a deep spiritual wound that does not heal. It has left me too weak to look after myself and advocate for my own needs.

And there sure as fuck wasn’t anyone around to do it for me, or even help me do it. I was left to raise myself, and breaking news, CHILDREN MAKE TERRIBLE PARENTS.

No guidance. No direction. No encouragement. No affection. No…. anything.

I keep going through this with my therapist. Most people have bad voices in their head. Words someone said that hurt them, the disapproving tone of an emotionally withholding parent, the criticisms of a negative relative, etc etc.

Not me. What I have, for the most part, is silence.. Death. Nullity.

I have my bad tapes too. My sister telling me I was useless when I wasn’t even in school yet. My parents airily telling me not to “spring” problems on them. Teachers saying whatever it took to get me to leave while clearly not considering my welfare worth the trouble of actually doing something about the bullying.

A certain teacher telling me none of the VFS faculty would recommend me for any kind of job ever.

But it’s the silent void that hurts the most. Day after day, year after year of absolutely nothing, total social isolation, all recorded with pinpoint precision by this oh so amazing brain of mine.

I wish I’d made more of a nuisance of myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I knew I’d probably have a good session today because I knew I would be showing up in a bad mood.

Historically. a lot of my best, most productive sessions have come when I showed up cranky and out of sorts.

My bad mood started when I looked to see if Sexout, the mod that let me have sexy fun times in Fallout New Vegas, was also available for Fallout 3.

And it was, yay! I was so excited.

But then I read further and discovered getting it to work would be a lot more complicated than it was with Fallout New Vegas, and I was disappointed.

And as patient readers know, I do not take disappointment well.

But there was more to it this time. The disappointment settled into my soul and metamorphed into something darker and uglier : a kind of cold, tight rage covered in a withering haughty disdain.

Julian, please skip the next two paragraphs.

Then the time came to go to therapy. As is the new normal. Joe begged off and got Julian to drive me. And when I came out at 12:30 pm, Julian was surprised and not even remotely ready. I had to wait for five minutes while he pulled himself together because of his lack of time awareness.

This did not improve my mood.

Then, on the way there, we switched on the good ol CBC and ended up listening to an infuriatingly content free Speech from the Throne where the current Governor General droned on in two languages about how the Trudeau minority government was going to do absolutely everything their research told them Canadians wanted but with absolutely no information as to where, when, and how.

What a bowel-breaking load of horse crap.

So by the time I got to therapy, I was feeling pretty grumpy. And like before, that seemed to energize the session and open the doors for me to express my emotions with greater force and far less abstraction than usual.

And anything that blocks my ability to intellectualize and opens up my ability to truly emote instead of just discussing my emotions is a good thing to me.

I am in bad need of an emotional enema.

Unfortunately. liquor is very, very bad for diabetics.

So I ended up talking about a wide range of subjects in therapy, but it wasn’t the subject matter so much as the passion and expression I put into it.

It’s like I was using that wave of angry energy to carry my emotions forward and get some of my anger about other things out at the same time.

It was really quite therapeutic. I should go to therapy cranky more often.

Maybe from now on, I will try to think of things that piss me off on the way there.

I picture the first words out of my mouth every session being “And another thing…”

And I know my therapist would be thrilled because he knows as well as I do that anger is my biggest issue and the one I have the hardest time confronting and expressing.

And that really pisses me off.

More after the break.

---

And I am back.

First, quick plug for an article I liked a lot (warning, some fairly gross stuff in here) : 55 Times People Had No Idea What They Were Looking At

Until the internet came to the rescue, that is. It’s 55 examples of times when people posted pictures of bizarre objects they had come across to the internet and said “Yo, WTF is dis?”.

I love that kind of article. It’s 55 fascinating mysteries, with solutions! My only quibble is that I wish the solutions came AFTER the pictures.

That’s pretty basic, folks.

Some of my faves :

On the one hand, I love how it looks. Like a tiny castle merged with a knight.

On the other hand, CLAUSTROPHOBIA.

Speaking of which, while I was making dinner, I had an idea for a PSA type thing to explain what it is like having an anxiety disorder.

The idea would be that you would cut between the anxiety sufferer and the control room of their mind, and show how their brain presses a big red panic button at the slightest sign of trouble and sometimes for no reason at all.

And when the button is presses, you get the whole red lights, sirens, people running around thing like it’s a high military alert, with people shouting “MAYDAY!” and “DIVE DIVE DIVE” and “EVASIVE MANEUVERS” and things like that.

And when it happens, our hero’s Reason is pushed out of control and a psycho mad dog hawk type military commander takes over.

That’s what a lady saw in the neighbour’s yard when she moved into a new apartment.

I would absolutely flip with joy if I saw that. I would immediately know that I had neighbours I could relate to. I would be so excited to meet them.

The article says it’s a voodoo altar. Which would be cool. But not as cool if it was just an expression of someone’s ineffable gothness.

Be my friend, goth neighbour! YOU COMPLETE ME!

Problem : regional iron deficiency.

Difficulty level : can’t get low-tech residents of the region to put chunks of iron into their cooking pots when they cook

Solution : shape metal into “lucky fish” and now everyone uses them and gets enough iron in their diet

It’s frigging brilliant, and so much better than some paternalistic Westerners lecturing them about science and nutrition.

You have to work with what they already believe, and chuck your bullshit about not supporting “superstition” and do whatever works.

And finally, they saved the best for last :

Actually, it’s something even better.

That is a ” Skvallerspegel “, or “gossip mirror”, and it is a mirror set up so you can keep an eye on your neighbours while sitting comfortable in your living room.

And I adore it. Face it, nosy old ladies are everywhere, but only in Scandinavia did they think to make it this user friendly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, here goes. Actually typing in my jokes.

You would not believe the amount of superstitious fear I am experiencing right now. As if writing them down will somehow rob them of their magic!

1. The car alarm is a failed technology. Nobody hears a car alarm go off and thinks “Oh no! Someone is stealing a car! I shall alert the authorities!”. They think, “Oh great, some asshole’s car alarm is going off. I wonder how long it will take them to turn it off? “. So what’s the point? Still, there is one good thing about them : they help you find your car. I remember the bad old days, when you’d leave the mall and wonder where the hell you parked. Nowadays you just press a button and it’s like your car says, “Here! I’m over here!”.
2. The dishwasher is also failed technology. See, I grew up without one. When I was a kid, a dishwasher wasn’t an appliance…. it was a person. Usually one of us kids. So when I encountered my first dishwasher as an adult, I thought it would basically be like a washing machine, but for dishes. But nooooo. There’s all these rules about where to put what dish and what can go in with what. And to top it all off, you have to scrape the dishes off first. What kind of bullshit is that?
3. Another failed technology? The self-checkout. It’s not faster. It’s not simpler. It’s sure as heck not easier. It’s really just a scam to make the customers do the cashier’s job so they can fire half their cashiers. So I refuse to use them. Why choose the option that comes with way more work AND guilt?
4. When a man calls a woman “cheap”, he means that he probably wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money to get her to sleep with him. When a woman calls a man cheap, she means he thinks he wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money to get to sleep with her.
5. I could tell you how old I am. But I prefer to tell you that Facebook is the only social media platform I use.
6. I’m 49 years old. But I’m also three years young. So, 46. Notice how they never describe anyone who is actually young as “X years young”? That’s how you know it’s patronizing bullshit. “Here’s my grandson, he’s 7 years young. ”
7. It’s when I am forced to wear suspenders that I start to understand how women feel about their bras. Sure, they get the job done, but at the end of the day you can’t wait to get those damned things off.
8. What I love about weed is that it makes overeating cool. “I ate a whole bucket of KFC, six Twinkies, and an entire ice cream cake last night. ” “You fat disgusting pig!” “…..cause I was STONED. ” “Oh! Cool bro. ” Call it the Seth Rogen effect.
9. I hate people who aren’t paying attention to me. So if you’re not paying attention to me right now, FUCK YOU.
10. And remember, the more you drink, the funnier I get. So if you’re not laughing, the problem isn’t that I’m not funny – it’s that you’re not drunk enough yet!

That’s a quick ten. You know, I think this actually made me more excited to tell the jokes because I developed them further in the process of writing them down.

And there’s lots more to go!

More after the break.

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Did comedy again. Not much response, as usual. But as usual, it was mostly because almost nobody was even paying attention.

Thanks folks. Really takes the pressure off.

Now where was I….

1. I suffer from social anxiety, because…. that’s pretty much all you can do with it. Social anxiety is… badly needing a refill but being unable to ask the waitress for one because she seems busy and you don’t want to bother her.
2. I am the cure for rape culture, because I am 6’1″, 300 pounds, and gay. In other words, I am the average white dude’s prison rape nightmare. So please, ladies, next time some incel neckbeard is going on about how women lie about rape all the time, call on me. “Yeah, so many false accusations of rape out there…. hey, can I buy you another drink? ”
3. Bruce Lee was the coolest man to ever live because he could make chicken noises and instead of them making him uncool, he made them cool.
4. There’s cat people and dog people, and I am a cat person. Yes… I am actually six cats in a human suit. Just kidding. You know cat people are a different breed because you can say “Cats are perfect killing machines!” and we just sigh and say “yeah. 🙂 ” Cats are introverts.
5. I like that cars these days have backup cameras for when the main camera fails.
6. I’ve never been very good at sleeping.
7. I’ll never be the little spoon
8. No cute animals were harmed during the production of this film.
9. Remember, technically, it’s only an elevator on the way up. On the way down, it’s a delevator. Same with escalators.
10. Only the knife is cutlery. The spoon is scooplery, and the knife is pokelery.

That’s enough for now, I think. I will do the rest tomorrow, and after that, well, I guess I will just have to start writing new stuff.

Feeling very sleepy all of a sudden. No mystery as to why – I didn’t sleep much last night. I was so upset by how hard I slept and how fucked up it made me yesterday that today I didn’t take a sleeping pill and therefore did not sleep much.

So it;s pick you poison, more or less. Either I oversleep and feel terrible or I barely sleep at all and feel terrible in a different way.

Well, like I said, I have never been very good at sleeping. Experts say that usually means something went wrong in my very early childhood that meant I never learned to soothe myself to sleep.

Yeah no shit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Aaaaand here I am, back to feeling terrible again.

My mistake, it seems, was taking my sleeping pill, Zopiclone. I took it at bed time (which for me is 7 am), slept really hard, woke up feeling absolutely horrible at around noon, ate lunch without even bothering to try to blog, and then went back to sleep for the whole god damned afternoon except for a brief period where I got up to pee, peed, then sat at the computer to try to do…. something.

But I was a fox of far too little brain to even just watch videos, so I went back to sleep.

And I am only doing marginally better now. I just yanked myself (wait for it….) back into focus after drifting off for a few seconds. Part of me very much wants to go back to sleep right about now.

And I might yet. It’s an open question. I want to go to Subway to hang out with my friends, but I might not make it. I feel so very tired and I am having so much trouble focusing. on the here and now.

Going back to bad sounds real good right now.

And I can’t help but feel, in this moment, that I am being punished for doing the right thing. Taking a sleeping pill in order to make sure I get uninterrupted sleep is exactly what I am supposed to be doing.

The idea is that I would get more good quality sleep and therefore have more of my mental resources to use to regulate my mood when I woke up.

Or something like that, Point is, it’s supposed to make me feel better. And I suppose it might still do that in the long run.

But I felt fine when I took the pill. Cheerful and relaxed and content. And when I woke up I felt utterly miserable, worse even than I do right now.

So like…. what the fuck, man. That’s now how this is supposed to work.

I guess I am paying off a serious amount of sleep debt in painfully large installments. It sucks but hopefully I will eventually feel a whole lot better for having done it.

Get my doors of perception cleansed, or at least given a quick rinse.

I think I will try to get a little more sleep before heading to Subway at something like 8 pm. It’s almost 6:30 pm now and I will need 15 minutes to shower and get ready, so that will give me around an hour to nap and maybe make it up the ring of consciousness to something approaching actual sentience.

Or maybe I would better off if I just said fuck it and told the guys I am just plain not going to make it out tonight and to back to bed with a smile on my face because it feels so damned good to just fall apart again,.

I will see how I feel when I get up again.

More after the break.

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Pity the Ascended

Been pondering the lack of authority in my life today.

Patient readers know all about this already, so bear with me, kind folk : basically, what I mean by a lack of authority in my life is that I cannot remember a time when I felt like there was someone far more powerful, intelligent, and wise who could force me to do what it wanted for my own protection and whom I could trust to keep me safe.

Maybe I had that sense before I was raped. Maybe not. I can’t say I remember either way. I remember being a happy kid before that and I certainly remember my babysitter Betty being able to “handle” me through will and skill.

But I can’t recall whether I felt protected by a greater power or not.

What I do remember is my school years, and never in that period did I feel like there was someone whom I could trust enough to believe that they would keep me safe and I could just relax and be a kid.

Mrs. Rogers came the closest. She, like Betty, had a lot of willpower and was skilled enough at manipulating kids that she could get through to me.

That was not easy. It’s not that I didn’t listen to what adults had to say. I did. But so little of what they had to say was interesting or relevant to me that I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it, and the sad thing is, for the most part, I didn’t have to.

Anyhow. Even Mrs Rogers was not enough to get me to trust someone with my safety. Life had taught me that there was nobody around to save me from anything ever anywhere and that my safety was in my own hands, period, forever.

And that’s a hell of a thing when you are a kid. And I was a kid alright, just one who talked like a tiny adult and thus often got treated like one.

That…. should not happen. With only myself to see to my own safety in a school where anyone was free to abuse me all they liked with no repercussions, all I could do was isolate myself as much as possible.

Had I been a difference kind of kid, maybe I would have roared like a dragon and attacked my unjust world with all my passion and strength until all feared to cross me and got my safety (?) that way.

But I was a soft, timid, frightened child, and so I hid myself away.

I still wish I had copped a major attitude instead. It was thinking about that possibility that got me thinking about this topic today.

I wish I had taken the attitude that I was smarter than everyone else and they suck my tiny wrinkly balls if they didn’t like it because they had no authority over me and I was going to do as I pleased until such time as someone could actually make me behave.

I wish I had done this because it would have essentially been a way to challenge the whole goddamned world to a fight. By doing so, I would maximize my chnaces of summoning a force that was actually more powerful than me and said force might actually be able to make me feel safe.

Maybe it would have been one person. Maybe it would have been a small group. Maybe it would have been an idea or an organization that I wanted to serve.

But surely something would have come alone that could defeat me.

Because the alternative is unthinkable.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Working in being, in general, pleased with myself.

This is big news. Generally, I either hate myself or try not to think about it. But I think I have been making real progress in dealing with my bullshit lately and I think I am ready to take a few steps in the direction of liking myself a fair bit.

After all, I’m a delightful fellow. I’m warm and intelligent and funny. People like being around me. I am a highly unique individual. I have never met anyone else quite like me. I shine with my own special kind of energy and love sharing that shine with others.

So what if I am not a traditionally productive citizen? I pay my way my own way. And oddly enough, I am sure I will find some way to earn some pay some day. Until then, I will keep on expressing myself in ways both old and new, and every day will bring a little bit of sunshine and a little bit of rain, and I will make it through okay no matter what.

Because there’s sunshine in my heart. It’s always there.

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Right now, I can’t find my deodorant and I can’t find my Wellbutrin.

My current theory is that they ran off together after a torrid affair.

My guess is they were ashamed of the illicit nature of their forbidden romance, and feared I would not approve.

They only had to ask. I’m famously tolerant.

Inanimate objects these days. Sheesh.

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I’ve been craving a Space Empire type game. The sort of thing where I can explore and colonize a big galaxy and build up my galactic civilization and that kind of thing.

So I bought this game Endless Space 2 on Steam. It had great reviews and it seemed like exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. And it was $12. So what the heck.

Did NOT make the learning curve. Too much to absorb too fast and that was the beginner’s tutorial. So I returned it.

Then I am talking to my friend Windchaser this morning and she recommends this game Galactic Civlilizations 2.

So I look it up on Steam and discover I already own it. It’s right there in my Library.

Must have gotten in from some bundle or another and forgotten it.

I get the feeling this is going to happen a lot in the future. I have over 100 games in my Steam Library now. I am bound to forget some now and then.

So I download and install it and try to make it through the tutorial but nope.

I think the problem is that I am craving a kind of game that I am not currently in the mood to learn to play.

That’s when I realized that what I really wanted was something like the old Master of Orion series. And following that thought, I googled Master of Orion.

Turned out, there is a fairly recent entry in the series.

The kicker? It’s made by the same people who made Endless Space 2.

Think I will just content myself with zapping Mutants in FO3 for now.

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Man blasting Super Mutants is fun.

Not that I’m racist or anything. All of them attacked me first. I’ve known some very nice super mutants who were well spoken and articulate and one of them even had a super sexy Michael Dorn voice.

Still not as sexy as my main crush Doc Mitchell though.

Those are both from Fallout New Vegas, though. I don’t think I have a crush in Fallout 3 yet. I’m spending too much time with things that want to kill me so I zap them with the alien laser gun I got from the UFO DLC I talked about before.

Speaking of which, I did another of the DLC quests earlier today. In this one, you travel to this remote outpost to…. play a VR simulation mission.

You read that right. In the video game, you play a video game.

How very meta.

It was actually rather fun, because it allowed the player (me) to play a somewhat different kind of game for a little while. One that is less serious and less realistic, with flashing powerups and less inventory and a more Xbox kind of feel.

That said, I was glad when I finally got back to reality…. well, the game’s version of it.

I’d really missed looting.

In the game’s reality, the only reason you are doing the VR thing is that it’s the only way to open up the armory of this secret base (plausible).

And of course, they had to thrown in the whole “if you die in VR, you die in real life!” thing in order to keep the stakes consistent (so VERY plausible).

Then when you finally complete the VR thing and get access to all the sweet gear in the armory (MEGA LOOTING), suddenly out of nowhere a bunch of the guys you were working with attack.

And I was all WTF but I kicked their asses with my alien laser phaser gun anyhow, and got me some VERY sweet power armor in the process.

Only later did I remember that they had set up that there was a rebel faction amongst the people I was working with, the Outcasts.

Yup. Rebel Outcasts.

These rebels had wisely waited until the armory was opened to launch their coup d’etat. So I launched my own coup d’etat by blasting their fucking heads off.

Then I got the fuck away from those people because even the good guy ones kept calling me “savage” or “outsider” or “wastelander” and being super prejudiced about the whole damn thing.

Well fuck YOU, this “savage” just saved your ass and made you all look like a bunch of pussies. So much for your tightassed military discipline and training.

Most recently, I saved a bunch of good guy mercs who were trapped on the roof of a hotel by Super Mutants.

Is it any wonder that I prefer the reality where I am a kickass hero?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here I am, blogging at 7:03 am because I am weird.

But like, new weird. Not the old weird that used to be the new normal but is now, quite frankly, the old and boring.

See how much sense that makes?

Anyhow, I am doing part one of my blogginating at this ungodly hour for a number of reasons, which I shall now denote :

1. I just finished playing a marathon session of Fallout 3 because once I started playing this kickass DLC where you get abducted by aliens and get to shoot a lot of them as you take over the ship, I just couldn’t stop. It was like my number one space opera era fantasy come true : to show a bunch of mean abductor type aliens that they picked on the wrong species this time! And after all that alien zapping, I have a lot of extra mental energy to burn
2. I wanted to rave about the DLC,. Mission accomplished.
3. I know that I will be busy with FRED tonight and hence not get my usual 7 pm blogging sesh in, so I figured I would write now and at 1 pm when I have lunch, and work it that way, and finally…
4. I am breaking old patterns to make room for newer, better ones, and let me tell you, it feels fantastic

Let me give you a picayune example.

When it came time for me to do the midnight munchies and viewing stuff with Joe and Julian last night, my cookie situation was thus : I had four Fruit Creme type cookies left, and an unopened box of Woortman sugar free wafer cookies in a flavour I had never tried before, namely orange creme. ^[1]

Normally, I would unthinkingly follow my compulsion to finish things before starting anything new and eat the fruit cremes.

But fuck compulsions. I have been letting them run my life for far too long because it was easier than actually having to make up my mind about things.

Pretty sad, right?

This is why having Mars in Pisces sucks so much. Mars is the planet of action and problem solving and initiative, and Pisces is the planet of passivity and indecision and lack of motive power.

Water doesn’t do anything on its own, after all, except seek its lowest level.

But I am getting over it. I am learning to accept structure within myself. I am willing to sacrifice some flexibility in my shapeshifting in order to grow a goddamned skeleton.

I am so goddamned tired of being so goddamned weak that I am willing to do whatever it takes to get some fire and power into my spirit and stop being so damn limp.

I am sick to death of being theoretically amazing. Potentially outstanding. A genius without muscle, a millionaire on paper, the ghost of someone who someday might have been someone worth noticing.

In fact, right now I might even settle for some genuine, actual, verifiable mediocrity.

At least I would have something real for a change.

More after the break.

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Clueless and adorable

That’s me all right.

And the two things are not unrelated. I think, as the youngest of four, I learned to be cute more of less from birth.

I didn’t know I was doing it, of course. It’s just the survival strategy I evolved into. When you are the youngest, you survive by being adorable and hence attracting nurturing.

The fact that it stopped working at some point did not break this pattern. And the problem with that pattern is that there is a lot – a LOT – of learned helplessness that comes with the package.

You survive by demonstrating that you need help, thus attracting help. In my case, by stumbling around cluelessly and doing the best I can with the unconscious hope that someone will take pity on me and/or find my fumbling incompetence adorable.

That is not an easy thing for any adult man to admit, but it’s especially hard for me because I have built up this picture of myself nobly resisting people taking things away from me because I am not doing them right and doing it themselves while all the time, I now realize, I have been depending on them doing so.

Because we all know what happens when I am left to my own devices.

My devices suck.

But is that true, or is that just the learned helplessness talking? I have thought of myself as a stumbling fool for so long that I honestly can’t tell. It could very well be that I am a lot more competent than I have traditionally let myself be because to actually rise to my own level of competence would be to risk losing the support I get from others, and getting said help is like my primary survival mechanism.

What if I dissuade my helpers and find out I can’t do it on my own? Then what?

On the other appendage, I won’t develop the kind of backbone and independence I crave and that I know is needed for me to grow up if there is always someone there to catch me when I fall.

So I either need to make a clean break from my current lifestyle and go live on my own for a while so I can learn to stand on my own two feet, or simply accept, fully, that dependence is part and parcel of who I am and how I live, and learn to adapt to that while still developing a positive self-image.

Honestly can’t tell which of those is harder, to be honest.

I suppose for now, I will try to make peace with being people’s oddball clumsy pet who is dependent like any other pet, but pays his own way in other ways.

But some day I will need to get away from it all and learn to live on my own.

Only then will I be able to truly become who I am.

And who I need to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.