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.

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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.