And once more., I circle back around to the subject of feeling like there is something I am supposed to be doing and the resulting feeling of failure for not doing it.

First off, let’s be realistic about whether or not this is something I can conquer. I think it’s clear by now that I cannot. At least, not in the frontal assault, sheer force of will way.

Which sucks because I am extremely good at that.

The question, then, is why not? And I think part of the problem is that I am not looking at the issue the right way.

This tendency of mine to feel that way isn’t a bad habit or an error in thinking. It is an instinct, the instinct known as motivation.

It’s the feeling that I want to be doing things. It is, in a sense, the master motivation, the one that is behind all other motivations, the urge to go and look and do.

I have suppressed that drive for as long as I can remember because I wanted to be safe. Exploration and activity led to risk and pain in my books. Better to just sit still and consume media in safety.

This desire for safety above all else, even if that means dousing the very spark of life that drives all creatures to go out into the world and get their needs met, can only come from a massive violation of safety early in life.

I was raped when I was only four years old. So yeah…. that.

And it’s very hard to overcome that kind of thing. My world was scary and dangerous after that. I handled it okay for a while. In many ways, I was the same happy go lucky, killer cute, so smart it’s scary kid afterwards.

But fragile. Oh so very fragile.

Then my two best friends, Patricia from next door and Janet from across the street, went off to school without me, first to kindergarten (mornings) then to elementary school (they were both a year older than me), and I had no friends any more.

Then I went to grade 1. And eventually, the bullying began, and I was too fragile and weak to fight back effectively, and life stop being good.

Sorry. Didn’t mean this to become yet another rehashing of my terrible childhood. But each time I do it, I process more of the emotions involved.

So some good comes of it.

I periodically try to ignite my spirit and overcome all that deep seated fear. But it’s like trying to light a fire in the freezing rain. So many of the linkages between my motivation and action are either broken or rusted shut from lack of use.

I would be happier if I could just relax and be patient about it and accept that it will take however long it takes and there’s nothing I can do to make it happen faster.

But I can’t. I am too eager to be born, and that eagerness burns me up inside and turns into something ugly and insane.

So maybe my best bet is to relax and accept that I can’t relax and accept things as they are and learn to enjoy the burning sensation inside me.

More after the break.

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Hey, guess what I found down that rabbit hole?

Another rabbit hole! Down we go.

I know that all this power inside me wants out. It wants to be expressed. It wants to flower and flourish in the real world instead of just being bottled up inside me and coming out as anxiety and/or depression now and then.

I think part of me is scared to make things real, though. When it’s all still in my head, I can control it. I’m comfortable in my own little world. It’s soothingly familiar.

I feel safe.

But when I start to let all that steam pressure out, or even just consider it, all this cold fear rises up inside me like a chilling mist and I start to feel a cold and clammy panic curling up around my soine and I freeze in place.

And the thing is, the part of me that does that thinks it is keeping me safe.

And in a very narrowly subjective sense, it is. After all, I was scared, and npw I am not, so I must be safe now. Right?

But that particular definition of safety doesn’t take any consequences of doing nothing into account. It takes safety as the ultimate good and any harm I incur while living like that is as invisible to me as if it was taped to the back of my head.

If I even think of breaking out of my tiny cage, that icy fear is there to keep me in my place. It is basically my depression’s enforcement mechanism.

And the icy coldness turns the energy I was trying to release and express into anxiety as a result.

If I could turn off the freeze machine, I might get out into the world and explore my options and make something of myself.

Even if that “something” is just 20 hours a week working nights at 7-11.

Hey, I could do worse. It’s work I know that I could do, assuming that I got around the “having to stand for a long time” problem.

And I would actually be earning a living for the first time in my entire 46 years of life. And that would do wonders for my self-esteem.

And I kind of assume they are always hiring for the graveyard shift. I mean, the turnover for that gig must be huge.

But I am already a night owl. So I’d have that.

And I mean, there must be other low end jobs with a huge employee turnover rate who would be desperate enough to hire a 46 year old person with no recent employment history but plenty of mental health issues, right?

Please tell me I am right.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Have been playing lots more Divinity : Original Sin 2 (DOS2), of course.

It’s exactly the sort of game I like : one with an open world and tons of quests.

Open world so that I have plenty of space and don’t feel stuck in a tiny space or forced to walk a certain linear track, and tons of quests because I am a very goal oriented person and thrive when there is someone (or something) to give me tasks to complete, for which I am rewarded on a per task basis.

I just wish the real world worked that way. I would be so productive!

I suppose freelancing on UpWork was kind of like that. You have to compete with others in order to get the “quest”, but then I got paid on completion, which rocked.

I keep telling myself I will get back into doing that some day. And I probably will. It just has ot wait until I get one of my waves of enthusiasm and self-confidence and can surf that into a new era.

Or at least some extra money.

Sad to say, UpWork is the only place where I have earned income since I was in my early 20’s and working for my uncle Sonny.

It’s also the only place where I have gotten work by applying for it. Every other job I sort of lucked into in one way or another.

Became a paperboy when the editor of the local paper, the Journal Pioneer, when the editor of the paper pulled up to me in his car when I was walking home from school and asked me if I lived in the neighborhood.

Hashtag only in a small town, hashtag simpler and more innocent times.

Got the job with my uncle via nepotism, obviously, though I was pretty darn good at it.

Even the “job” selling Dickie Dee frozen confections from a bicycle cart I got pretty much just for showing up.

The hours were long, but at least the pay was terrible.

So really, UpWork was the best place for someone like me until I bit off more than I could chew with some jobs that were not just “do this get paid” type jobs and required me to stay focused and motivated for what turned out to be far longer than I could.

Lesson learned. Don’t go for that kind of job again. Stick with the one and done kind of thing, with no long gaps with nothing to do but wait for depression to set in.

That said, there is still a large hunk of my craziness to overcome before I go back to UpWorking again. Specifically, the feeling that I crashed and burned the last time and that I did so in the worst way, by just ghosting on people, and so that will be a black mark against me forever and nobody will ever hire me again.

That, of course, comes with a massive dose of shame. Sigh.

But of all the possible paths out of my current quagmire (giggity), that one seems like it has the least to overcome.

I will think it over.

More after the break.

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Anhedonia and Motivation in Depression

Right, I was going to get into this today.

To recap : somehow, I had not thought to connect anhedonia and motivation in depression before now.

Anhedonia is one of the symptoms of depression and it refers to depression’s signature lack of the ability to experience pleasure.

Depression sufferers often find it hard to take pleasure in anything, even things they once enjoyed. This fits in rather neatly with my theory that everything in depression stems from a kind of numbness.

This numbness, in turn, comes from a psychological injury that the mind cannot heal. Normally, the numbing would be a short term solution that is only there to keep the mind calm while it heals, like a topical anesthetic applied to a physical wound.

But if the wound never heals, the anesthetic never wears off, and if further injuries occur, the problem only gets worse.

And the cruelest truth is that it is often the problems created by the first injury that leads to further injury.

This has been my theory of depression for a very long time. But somehow, until now, it had not occurred to me that this was the source of another symptom : depression’s telltale lack of motivation.

Obviously, if things are very unrewarding due to anhedonia, they are not going to be very motivating. Why take up arms against a sea of troubles when the psychological rewards are so paltry?

On a deep level, every person with depression knows this. That’s why it is so hard for us to find the motivation to do things which seem quite easy and normal to those who have never suffered from depression.

Those people get sufficient psychological reward – as in, activation of the reward centers of their brains – to make doing these things “worth it”.

But the depressive’s mind does not. The numbness prevents it. And it is this numbness which must be treated if the depression is to be treated.

This numbness is also the root cause of the person with depression’s tendency to self-medicate with one addiction or another.

In order to experience any pleasure at all, the person with depression has to concentrate on the most rewarding things with the least investment of effort possible.

Only such a high effort to reward ratio can pierce the numbness enough to provide enough motivation to keep doing the thing.

Viewed like this, depression can be seen as a perfectly logical reaction to a vastly changed table of costs and rewards.

To put it crudely, if you have depression, everything costs more and pays less.

No wonder we people with depression end up fixating on whatever pays the most and costs the least. It’s the only way we can turn a “profit”.

Ironically, our number one treatment for depression consists of drugs that make us even more numb. This is necessary so that the person can function well enough to get treatment, but in the long term it may be the wrong approach.

I think I am going to talk with my therapist about lowering my Paxil dose this week.

It’s high time I started feeling more things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Actually, that’s not true,.

What I am is a very, very good liar who chooses not to do it because he is a fundamentally honest person who can’t stand insincerity and dissembling, especially when it’s coming from himself.

That said, when there has been occasion to lie in the past, I have been shocked and somewhat depressed by how easily and well I do it.

Invariably, this only happens when I am caught by surprise and have to cover my ass somehow. That’s not a scenario that comes up a lot in my life, so my Pinocchio score is still pretty damned low.

But it isn’t zero. I am too honest to claim that it is.

Even when I feel I was justified in lying, I don’t like it. It feels gross to me. That sensation of reality splitting into the real version and the version where the lie is true is highly unpleasant to me.

Plus remembering a lie is just too much work for me. Honesty is a lot easier.

And honesty feels good. Solid. Reliable. Like a good mid-sized sedan. When you are honest, you have the strength of your convictions because you know without a doubt that you mean what you say.

And that kind of integrity sends a powerful message to others that you can be trusted. And that not only helps you socially, it helps you psychologically as well.

It feels good to know you are an honest and trustworthy person.

There is a limit to how moral honesty can be, of course. As painful as it is for me to admit it or even think about it, there are situations where lying is the moral thing to do, no matter how reluctant I am to actually do it.

Gone are the days when I was an absolutist about the truth. I eventually figured out that this was less a moral position and more the delusional belief that what felt right for me (constant total honesty) just happened to always be the right thing to do as well.

I ain’t got time for that kind of bullshit. Reality is more complicated than that, and for those of us both determined to do the right thing and smart enough to see through a lot of the social reality BS that other people use instead of true morality, there is no room for that kind of intellectual shortcut.

Who knows what the future holds, though. It might be that as I get older and my mental faculties start to decline, my current level of honesty will prove unsustainable and I will have to settle for being mostly honest.

You know. On average.

I hope not, though. If it comes to that, I think I would rather jettison my diplomatic skills and go back to being blunt instead.

I just have to wait until I am visibly old enough to get away with it.

Was that too blunt? It’s just that I’m so old and confused……

To be honest…. that sounds like a lot more fun.

More after the break.

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What’s the matter, Colonel Sanders?

Decided I felt like having KFC tonight. So my usual order of a four piece meal type dealie is on its way.

That means it’s time to blog, even though the words are having a hard time making it out of my head through the semi-frozen molasses that has flooded my brain.

Dunno why, but I am feeling extremely thick right now. Not exactly stupid but not far from it. I feel like if I suddenly had to deal with a difficult situation, the best that I could do right now would be to smile and hope I could charm and halfass my way through it.

Maybe I need more sleep. Maybe this is the result of playing too much Divinity : Original Sin 2 lately. Maybe I am getting burned out.

Come to think of it, this mental state does seem quite similar to the one I would find myself in after an exam.

Guess I was thinking about the game like…. really really hard.

As a result, I feel thick as…. um…. thick as.a…. dammit, some very thick thing…. thick as… help me out here, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull…

Yeah. Like that.

The game is going well. I had a period where I wasn’t getting anywhere and was just sort of wandering around without any real goals, but I got over that and started trying harder at various places where I had been stymied before, and lo and behold, I overcame the obstacles and got things flowing again.

Like so much in life, a lot of it came down to confidence and focus. The confidence to think I could beat these tough fights and the focus to keep myself from getting nervous or giving in to feeling helpless and confused.

And to just keep trying dammit. So I suppose persistence is also involved. The problem with giving up easy is that you don’t have the memories of overcoming things via persistence that would reinforce persistence as a behavioural pattern.

And if you have depression like I do, the problem is further compounded. Because when I overcome something by persisting, I don’t get a feeling of triumph.

I am just glad it’s over.

Like, right before coming here to blog, I finally beat a rather hard fight I had been defeated by many times before, and I was kind of happy I had finally won for maybe two seconds then it was gone.

I honestly don’t care. I mean, obviously I care enough to have done it, but when I think about it now, the best I can muster emotionally is a sort of grim satisfaction.

All I really think about is all the stress and effort that went into it.

And I know that’s not right. I know other emotions should be there. I know that with rewards that feeble, it’s no wonder I have trouble with motivation.

Work hard, really apply yourself, pour your sweat and tears into it, and you too could enjoy this tiny moment of halfhearted happiness.

I can’t believe I never saw the connection between depression’s anhedonia and its lack of motivation before now.

Remind me to do a whole thing about it soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well it seems like my period of relative peace is over and life has decided to start fucking with me again.

Here’s today’s edition of the Fucking with Fru Daily.

I had asked Joe if he could take me to my branch of Van City, my credit union, so I could cash my GST cheque.

This needed to happen as said GST cheque was all I had to cover this week’s expenses. Stupid five week month and all that.

We had agreed to head out at 1 pm today. Joe pops into my room at half past noon to ask if it can be 2 pm. Sure, no prob.

2 o’clock rolls around and he fobs the job off on Julian. I have no reasonable reason to complain about this, even though it makes me feel bad, so I do not complain.

For the record, it makes me feel like I am not super important. Whatever.

So we get to the bank and there’s no tellers free, but a nice fellow beckons me over to one of the desks they use for opening new accounts and whatnot.

I endorse the check and give it to him, and after a minute or so he tells me that my account is overdrawn by $136.

This could not have shocked me more if it had been delivered by a ghost.

Turns out, the lovely people at Doctors Without Borders, to whom I donate $20/month, had tried to charge said donation to my bank account.

This has happened before, and all that happened was that the next time I cashed my monthly check, the little overdraft came off the check first.

But this time, they had upgraded their software’s evilness so that it now did what every other bank does and charged me a $25 overdraft charge.

So now I was $45 overdrawn. Repeat four more times – all without telling me a thing, because they could charge me more money that way – and now I owe them $136.

I freaked out.

Obviously, I could not have the whole frigging check disappear on me for charges I knew nothing about and never agreed to.

This is exactly the same kind of shady shit that TD pulled on me way back when we lived on Francis Road.

Van City changed the rules on me and tried to screw me over. So I was upset and angry and made my oonion known. Asked them why I shouldn’t just take my check back and go cash it at Money Mart, who would only charge me nine bucks, not the whole thing, and then never go to Van City again.

I also told them that I would tell everybody I knew about how Van City preys on the poor and the disabled in order to screw them out of money they don’t have,.

I even quoted their slogan, “make good money” back at them, and said “I don’t know what make good money means to you, but this ain’t it. ”

So they agreed to give me the full amount of the check in cash, and I have an appointment tomorrow to see about getting a tiny loan to cove the overdraft so I can pay it off in installments instead of having $136 of my next monthly check vanish when I go to cash it next week.

All of this has me terribly upset, natch, but at least I really stood up for myself.

If there is one area in which I have absolutely no problem asserting myself, it’s my money. You can do a lot of things to me and I will be mild and reasonable.

Come for my money and it’s all out fucking ar, especially if I feel like I am being ripped off. Maybe they get away with this bullshit with richer folk but not with me.

One last thing : I think I made the account manager throw up in his mouth a little. At least, I smelled vomit on his breath.

And I am ashamed to admit that I am a little proud of that.

Don’t fuck with my money, bitch.

More after the break.

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The Fifth Game

Oh right… the fifth and final game review.

Mister Shifty. Wow, what a game.

It’s another high speed, high intensity kickass top down game like JYDGE. And like with that awesome but absurdly named game, you would think that the highly limited, and cartoonish graphics would make for a lame ass game.

But you would be very, very wrong.

There’s not much story. You’re some kind of special agent who has the ability to teleport (or “shift”) short distances at will.

You are fighting your way through some kind of office building. Opposing you are hordes of bad guys with guns.

And you are definitely NOT bulletproof. One bullet is all it takes to kill you. So in order to take out the bad guys, you have to shift around a lot and take advantage of things like cover, the element of surprise, firing angles, ambushes, and so on.

It all adds up to something that feels a lot like starring in a kickass action movie, and I love it. You die a lot (YDAL) but each room is relatively short and small, so there is not a lot of repetition.

In addition to your punching powers, you can also use weapons you find, including brooms, coffee mugs, and random lengths of wood. that sort of look like oars.

This game kicks ASS. It’s a ton of fun and very exciting. When you thread your way through a flood of baddies and take them all down, the thrill is intense. The action is fast and requires a lot of split second decision making, yet I don’t find it overwhelming.

And the compact design makes dying over and over until you figure out how to make it through a room no big deal.

In fact, in many ways, it’s like a high speed puzzle game. But with ass kicking.

Totally recommend it. Way to go, tinyBUILD!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did one of those el cheapo game bundle things that I do from time to time. Cost me $2.59, or 51.8 cents per game.

At that price, I am virtually guaranteed to get my money’s worth for each game. The entertainment value of just getting to try something new is worth more than that.

And with the weather all snowy and dull, and with my usual supplies dwindling away, I thought it would be the perfect time to give some new stuff a try.

So without further ado, here are my little reviews of the five games I got, in no particularly meaningful order :

Little Big Adventure. Trash. Absolute garbage. Everything about it sucks. Bad writing, terrible voice acting, ugly graphics, cheap sound effects, inane controls… the list goes on and on. Trying this game wearied my soul.

All the moreso because, knowing the game was a hit way back in 1994 (!) when it came out, I kept playing as I tried to see the appeal.

But it has none, at least for me. And it being from 1994 only partially excuses its flaws, as I was around in 1994 and I don’t recall it being the Year Where All Games Sucked.

Still, I suppose it was an achievement of sorts in its day. It would have been impressively 3D for something that came out before Wolfenstein, and it is clearly the product of one person’s particular vision, and that counts for something.

But by today’s standards, it sucks ass.

Oh, and here’s the kicker : I was playing the “enhanced edition”.

Now with even more total crap!

Fall of Light : Darkest Edition. Amateurish and pretentious, which is always a winning combo. But not without some promise.

Of course, anything looked good to me compared to Little Big Adventure Enhanced Edition. It could have been Pong played via blinking and it would still have looked like a million dollars in the bank.

The basic idea : There was nothing. That had people in it. Tormented souls in chaos. Then light came and now there could be stuff. And everything was awesome for “13 eras”. But then a wizard named Pain was born and he was evil and fucked everything up just for the hell of it. You fight his evil forces in order to bring back the light.

Or something like that.

It’s very ambitious, and that’s a good thing, but it bites off a lot more than it can chew. The controls are clunky and the dialogue is nowhere near as deep as it thinks it is.

I like the metaphorical aspect of it. Light versus darkness is always a good theme, in my opinion. Being visual creatures who are most active during the day, we humans tend to see light as good and shadow as bad.

The truth is more complex, but isn’t it always?

Still, not a great game. Not a keeper. I can’t see myself playing it in the future. The plot and premise are somewhat intriguing but not enough to get me past the weak gameplay and general ponderous pretentiousness.

Give it a miss.

More after the break.

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Dex, Very interesting. Possibly very good as well.

Certainly very ambitious. You play Dex, an ordinary person in a dark cyberpunk dystopia who was chosen by a god-like AI to carry its “seed” – enough of its programming to restart it outside of the control of the evil corporate government.

This means you can connect to the cyberweb without a jack.

This freaks people out.

So far I am very much enjoying the setting and the story, and the voice acting is excellent. It is even an open world game, which I enjoy.

I am still undecided on the combat though. It’s not bad but it’s not great. At first, all you can do is punch people, which get old pretty fast.

I bought a gun but don’t know how to use it yet. That’s on me though.

Overall I am quite intrigued and look forward to exploring this cyberpunk future.

Odyssey : The Story Of Science. AKA “Reading With Some Puzzles”.

This game is a very good attempt at blending education with adventure. But not really a successful attempt, as that is nearly impossible to do effectively.

The idea is that it’s up to you to rescue a science and history loving family from evil sailors who are forcing them to dig for a mythical hidden treasure.

In order to do so, you are going to have to solve all the history of science based puzzles they left behind in order to slow down the scientifically ignorant evil sailors.

What you mostly end up doing is reading the journals that the daughter of the family left behind then using that knowledge to solve puzzles.

I don’t normally mind reading, but it’s not what I am looking for in a video game. And the puzzles are not too hard so far, but I am betting that it will not be long to before I hit one that exceeds my (low amount of) willingness to put up with being frustrated and having not one clue what to do next.

I am not proud of my low frustration tolerance in those situations. In the journals, the father keeps asking his kid the sort of “figure it out yourself” questions that bring out the worst in me because I get so frustrated and angry. “Just tell me already!!”.

My therapist has learned not to do that to me. It is not helpful.

And the thing is, I know damned well that I am smart enough to figure these things out. So it really comes down to character. My natural gifts are such that I have not had times in my life where I had no choice but to figure shit out, even when I have no clue where to go from here, and so I never developed the discipline.

I wish I’d had a mentor who was both tough and patient enough to make me think outside the box and solve puzzles that were beyond my natural capacities.

But no. I never had to overcome frustration. So I never learned to do it.

Not even in the idealized world of video games.

I will talk to you nice people (and review the fifth game) tomorrow.

This just in : no comedy tonight due to inclement weather.

In other words, it snowed, and shiznit is all funked up.

And seeing as Felicity’s parents don’t even want her driving here in Richmond, asking our MC, Chris, to come all the way from White Rock is out of the question.

And I must admit, I am disappointed. I like comedy night. I like the food, the company, the atmosphere, and the chance to get up there and shine.

But I am also relieved as I was just starting to have a serious panic attack about it.

This happens a lot. I am used to it. Pretty much every time I am going to leave the house, even if it’s just to hang with Le Gang, I will have at least one mild panic attack beforehand, which I suppress and/or endure with relative ease.

That’s just life chez moi. This particular panic attack was above average in size and might have developed into a major one if I had not managed to nip it in the bud.

Those happen sometimes. Rarely. Generally they make me miserable for a little while and then my defenses kick in and drag me back down to neutral-ish.

Makes me wonder what kind of price I am paying for my ability to do that, though. Because it’s definitely not a delicate operation. It’s raw brute force suppression of emotion, and that’s probably not good for me.

In fact, it’s entirely possible that I overcorrect. That the price I pay for killing my panic is being emotionally numb, and that it’s that numbness that is the root of my depression.

Which would be, I suppose, quite ironic.

---

Been reading this pretty good article about gender and violence and attachment styles called THE OPPOSITE OF RAPE CULTURE IS NURTURANCE CULTURE by someone named Nora Samaran.

Let me get this out of the way : “nurturance” is not a word, and is also a very clumsy and unpleasant formation of its concept.

Just say “nurturing”. Way better. Moving on.

The article really speaks to me because I am a man with a very strong urge to nurture. To the point of referring to myself as a “maternal male”.

As such, I grew up with very few role models, and anything I saw where men displayed nurturing traits really stood out in my mind.

Like in the original The Odd Couple movie, at the very beginning, when all the poker buddies are worried that Felix is going to try to kill himself and they are all scrambling to (rather clumsily, because comedy) comfort him and convince him to not do it.

That made a big impression on me because it’s so rare to see anything where men openly care about one another. And that’s so messed up.

Then there’s the line from The Birdcage where Robin William says Nathan Lane’s character “is so maternal he’s practically a nipple”.

That’s the only cultural reference I have for a man being maternal. And that was in reference to a flamboyantly gay man.

Which was lucky for me, because I am a gay man too.

I shudder to think of what it would be like to have strong maternal, nurturing, “soft” instincts as a heterosexual man.

It’s the sort of thing that might make a man very bitter and angry and cruel from the frustration of not being able to express their true selves, not to mention the self-loathing engendered by their poor gender performance.

It might even make a man hate women with a passion out of sheer jealousy. It might even make him very controlling of women because he so desperately needs someone to express what he cannot and give him the nurturing and care he can’t give himself.

It might even make him lash out at those same women in a blind rage.

When men are forced to suppress all that is tender and loving in themselves, the whole world pays a terrible price.

More after the break.

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In regards to attachment styles :

I am definitely a mix of anxious and avoidant. I can be very demanding and clingy and need loads and loads of affection in order to feel secure. Yet I can also be extremely aloof and detached and distant.

Sometimes I need cuddles and sometimes I need space. And I can’t predict which mode I will be in any better than anyone else can.

So when I do get into a relationship one day, I will likely not be quite as low maintenance as I would like to be due to unpredictability.

But it’s not all about me. I can act contrary to my current mode if I think that it is the right thing to do. If my husband needs cuddles, he will get cuddles, even if I am feeling like I need some space to breathe.

Not sure I can go the other way, though. If I need cuddles and he needs space, I am going to get pretty darn pouty.

Overall, I know that I have severe issues when it comes to getting close with people. My ice cold childhood did not contain close relationships. Even my relationship with my mother was somewhat at a distance and detached, and she’s the person I have been closest to in my entire life.

My brother Dave would be next in line. He an I are a lot alike and we spent a hell of a lot of time hanging out together.

But mostly as adults. In my childhood, I rarely had friends, and my family barely noticed me at all. I lived a lonely life of school and TV and video games and books.

Again I am forced to wonder how it was that I grew up as functional and sane as I did.

I can only conclude that I am a fundamentally stable person and that carried me through all those lonely years until the internet came along and I found furry fandom and had friends through it.

I remember some very not sane moment from back then. Times when depression and anxiety swirled together into a maelstrom of terror and isolation that made me feel like I was naked in a blizzard and that went on for hours.

I guess I am healthier now than I was then.

But I get so very, very tired of it all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or 8 words per wink, for those of you keeping score.

Having one of my sleepy days. No big whup. The first one is always easy.

It’s when it drags on day after day that I lose the ability to treat it philosophically and end up feeling miserable about the whole thing.

Hopefully that will not happen this time. If tomorrow I am bitching about how I don’t want to sleep, I want to do stuff, I want to have fun, you know it’s lingered on.

Right now, it’s the nice kind of sleepy. The kind that makes me feel warm and relaxed and soft and cozy.

Here’s hoping it goes no further than that.

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On the video game front, I finally caved in and downloaded a mod for Divinity : Original Sin 2 that resurrects all my characters if we win the fight.

That’s how every other game in the genre works. DOS2 makes you buy very expensive resurrection scrolls and if you run out of those and don’t have enough gold or gear to trade for one, the character just stays dead.

And that makes the stakes just too damned high. I don’t want to have to reload my saved game every time a character dies because I have no scrolls and I don’t feel like having my fighting strength down by a quarter until I get enough gold for a scroll.

The game is hard enough when I have 4 characters fighting. With only three, it would be damned near impossible. So how would I earn the gold I needed?

To me, that’s a violation of the number one golden rule of video games : the player is never, ever totally fucked. It’s a soft violation, because in theory you could come back from it, but realistically speaking, fat fucking chance.

I haven’t had a chance to actual test the mod yet because I am currently stuck on a fight where I have to defeat not just some human baddies (fucking White Magisters) but a metric butt-ton of sentient blobs of crude oil. ^[1]

It’s not that difficult a fight, but it is a very long fight, and that has a tendency to lead to my making stupid mistakes late in the fight and getting myself killed.

Hopefully I will have some kind of strategic inspiration that will make the fight a bit less wearying and manage to get past it.

I could skip it, of course, and go elsewhere in the game’s open world in search of adventure. But everywhere else seems to have fights so tough the game actually straight up tells me I should run away.

Which is another mark against it, honestly. If your supposedly “open world” game can only be done in a certain order and there’s no way to figure out what that order is except by traveling around and getting your ass kicked by everything until you finally find something you can beat, that’s like…. bad.

If I wasn’t such a stubborn son of a bitch, and if the game wasn’t so damned good, I might have given up by now.

Games should not be actively trying to kill your motivation.

More after the break.

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Quick update : finally beat that long fight I mentioned above. But when I finally won, the mod that was supposed to resurrect all my dudes did not do so.

And I was down to just one character left. So that was like…. bad.

So I used up my last three resurrect scrolls to get back into fighting shape, because there was no way I was going to go through all that shit again.

Hopefully I will get the mod working and it won’t matter. I got it through the Steam Workshop, and I haven’t modded anything that way in a while, so maybe I was supposed to activate the mod somewhere.

Otherwise, well, I just hope there’s some easier meat n’ potatoes type adventuring out there for my poor crew, because these big fights are hard enough to survive, let alone survive without losing anybody.

Another thing : at the beginning of the fight, the bad guy, White Magister, is tormenting this other dude.

I forget the other dude’s name, so we’ll call him Slim.

In the intro to the battle, you can distract Jonathan long enough for Slim to untie himself, and then Jonathan notices Slim is untied and the fight begins.

So far so good. But the thing is, Slim is not very smart. All he cares about is killing Jonathan. So in the ensuing fracas, he inevitably dies.

But I have a quest to talk to him. So now what?

Well, in a normal game, he’d have a letter or a book or some other object that substitutes for actually talking to him by giving us the same information.

But that’s sissy stuff by DOS2’s standards. Slim died, therefore I can’t talk to him, therefore I came away from this fight no further ahead than when I started it.

The quest listing just says “Slim is dead. ”

Now, if it turns out that I can’t beat the game without Slim being alive at the end of the fight so I can talk to him, I am going to scream.

Keeping him alive through that fight would be damned near impossible, as the fight inevitably ends up with fire everywhere due to all that oil, sentient and not, going everywhere. And fire does damage to you when you walk through it, and Slim is waaay too stupid to just sit still.

I suppose I could use my wizard’s teleport spell to teleport Slim to safety, but of course he would not stay there.

So I dunno. Might be that the only way to keep that dumb motherfucker alive is to stay right next to him and heal him constantly.

That would truly, deeply, and irrevocably suck.

I will see if i can get the mod working. And I will see whether or not saving Slim is mandatory. I sincerely hope it is not.

Because if it is…. I may have to start over in “tourist” mode (the lowest difficulty level) because the game has me beat.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Signed up for this website called Vocal.

Despite its name, it is actually text based. It’s one of those websites where writers like me can write articles and put them on the site and if enough people read them, we actually get paid with real, honest spendable cash.

So on the one hand, opportunity. On the other hand, competition.

I know I’m a good writer. I know I can write stuff that people think is very funny. I can also write things that being find to be very provocative, to put it mildly.

In other words, I can really piss people off.

So the real question is whether or not I am willing, ready, and/or able to write with popular appeal in mind.

The answer is a resounding maybe.

I have nothing against writing for popular appeal. I am no literary snob. I want to make people happy with my writing. I don’t care what other writers think of me.

So there is no conflict there. Instead, the conflict stems from a combination of fear and laziness on my part.

The fear is fear of exposure, of course. What other fear is there for a socially anxious dude like me? If I put my writing out there for other people to see, I am exposing myself instead of hugging the shadows like a good little wraith.

And it’s not even that I fear criticism. Criticism I can handle. I am confident that I can take the criticism, evaluate it, and either agree with it, in which case I learn from it, or disagree with it, and laugh it off.

No, the exposure itself is what I fear, not the consequences thereof. Leaving this warm little cage that goes nowhere is a big challenge for me. It can feel like if I go out there, I will die like Dracula in a sunbeam.

Not true, obviously, but the feeling remains.

After all, I am crazy.

The other challenge. Sure, I am a great writer – but am I good enough to beat the no doubt thousands of other writers on this platform? Or at least do well enough to make a little money at it?

Possibly. Probably. Maybe, I honestly don’t know.

And I won’t know until I try, which I will do once I am done this part of my day’s blogging. I have written a lot of fairly good stuff over lo these many years, and It’s all saved on my hard driver somewhere, and so when I am done my First 500 here, I will go poke around my collection and find something in decent enough shape to be my little trial balloon to get used to the interface and see if I can catch people’s attention.

It’s that second bit that worries me. I have no talent for self-promotion, at least not yet, and that means I have no idea how to get people to read my stuff in the first place.

So this might go nowhere. I might put something out there, have it go completely unnoticed, and be no further ahead.

But at least I will have tried.

More after the break.

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It’s possible that I will move this blog to Vocal.

Not likely, mind you, but possible. This blog’s primary purpose is self-expression, not entertainment. Putting it on the Vocal platform would only work if it turns out that my writing in this blog resonates with people.

And it might. Certainly, it might appeal to other people with depression, and those who are involved with someone with depression. I could see establishing myself as a highly articulate “voice of depression” and sort of building a brand out of that.

Of course, there’s lots of other people with both depression and blogs out there. But few are as articulate as me and even fewer have also given the subject as much thought and examination as I have.

So it’s a possibility. At the very least, I could move the depression related entries of the future to Vocal and see if I can develop a following there.

This just in (from my brain) : I should start commenting on other people’s blogs in order to make myself a known figure on Vocal.

At the very least, if I wrote about depression, I would be “writing what I know”.

This would also be true if I wrote about video games.

Not reviews, though. At least, not at first. I can’t afford the latest hotness in video games most of the time, and I can’t imagine there is a lot of demand for the kind of games that I can afford, which are usually at least three years old.

If I started making money at the gig, then I might be able to afford the new hotness while it is still new and hot. Either that, or I would become enough of a “real” video game critic to get my games for free.

But barring that, I would be sharing my thoughts on video game theory. What makes a game good, what makes it suck, what is the nature of grind and how games can avoid it, what makes a game replayable, and so forth and so on.

I have played video games for nearly my entire life (to be fair, the games that came out when I was an infant weren’t that good) and I have had a lot of time to think about them and what makes them tick.

And I have oodles of other interests, of course. Politics. Psychology. Science. Philosophy. Science Fiction. Science history. The list goes on and on.

So who knows. Maybe I will end up with a whole bunch of blogs, each one dedicated to one of my many interests, and the ones that are successful will get more entries and the ones that are less successful will wait til I really feel I have something to say.

Or can’t think of anything better, anyhow.

My point is, I got plans.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve never really been in sync with the world.

I’ve talked about this before. I live in a cage inside my mind, and that makes it hard to deal with life in realtime.

It’s one of the perils of being a thoughtful kind of person. You are fine in situations where you have time to think about each action.

But life – real life – is much faster than that. As fast as thought can be, the world is often much faster, and reason simply cannot keep up.

There is no time to carefully think through every decision. You need something faster that thought – you need emotion.

Or, in this case, instinct. By that, I don’t literally mean instinct in the strictly biological sense. I mean more like what we mean when we say someone “goes with their gut”.

Instinct. Intuition. Call it what you will.

But if you are a thinker type, you don’t trust instincts or intuition. After all, you can’t verify them via reason. Not in realtime.

And so you second-guess your instincts all the time, which greatly impairs their efficiency and effectiveness.

This leads to being very awkward and clumsy in situations where realtime reactions – the fast circuit of the brain – are needed, whether you are trying to catch a pass in gym class or make a pass on a date.

Hence the socially awkward nerd versus the confident and successful jock. The jock’s main advantage is not their physique, it’s their trust in their own instincts. Instincts that have been honed by a lot of practice on and off the field.

A lot of the problems we nerds have in life come from us trying to think our way through situations where we would be far better off going with our gut.

In my own so-called life, this is illustrated by my preference in strategy games.

I only do turn based strategy. The realtime strategy games freak me the hell out. I am fine when I am gathering resources and building bases and designing my defenses, but when the enemy shows up and I have to command my troops in realtime, suddenly I have to switch modes and I freak out.

I am a much better strategist than I am a commander.

Don’t get the wrong impression, though. It’s not all bad news for us thinking types. Our ability to think deeply and thoroughly about things unlocks universes of possibilities for us and for humanity.

We are wizards. We do things that the more action oriented types can only see as magic as they can see the results but cannot comprehend how they were produced.

We human beings have these big brains for a reason : reason! It’s us thinkers that rule in science and technology and all the products thereof. And we are also the ones who create great works of creativity that can only come from those who think and feel deeply about the world.

The jocks might win the big game, but they don’t win Nobel prizes.

I know which I would prefer.

More after the break.

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Under the Weather

Oy, the weather.

It’s cold as yesterday’s fuck and the wind is blowing hard enough to make the building shake and it’s dark and it’s nasty and I just want to hide under the covers and hibernate.

And aside from the dark part, it’s been like this all day. No wonder my nerves are so frayed, and I feel scared and shaken and not at all well.

And we leave for FRED in less than an hour. Peachy.

I am not at all sure I will make it. I don’t feel very good right now and while I know that this feeling is mostly emotional, not physical, it is nevertheless quite real and I still have to deal with it anyway.

The real problem is that it’s fuckin’ cold in this here bedroom of mine. It’s a frigging icebox in here. The heat is just plain not heating. I had the thermostat up to 27 degrees all afternoon and I am pretty sure the heat didn’t kick in once.

It sure as fuck isn’t doing jack shit right now.

And it gets this way every time it’s really windy. Sucks all the heat right out of the room. I have the windows shit as tight as tight as I can make them and yet there’s still enough of a draft to make the blinds on the big window right behind my computer billow.

Mental note : buy some goddamned thermal tape online.Seal up the windows with it. Make this room of mine retain heat.

Of course, it would have to generate some heat before it could retain it. I am convinced that the only reason this room isn’t so cold I can see my breath is the heat that leaches in from the rest of the building, where the good and decent people live.

Freaks like me get to freeze to death like the little fucking matchstick girl, it seems.

I am trying to separate my emotional disturbance from my physical health and remind myself that White Spot is probably relatively warm compared to this iceberg of a room, but it’s so hard to do it.

And the ill but tempting voice that urges me to call the whole thing off so I can stay home, order in, and play video games is getting harder and harder to resist.

I am on the edge of freaking out here. I wish i still had my old space heater so I could get some heat up in this bitch.

But if I still have it, I don’t know where the hell it is. Iam going to have to try just burying the dial on the thermostat for my room and seeing if THAT makes the heat turn on.

If not, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. I sure as fuck don’t feel like getting in the car and going out into this dark and stormy night.

Maybe I will burrow underground and sleep till spring.

Yeah…. that sounds good.

Anybody got a shovel?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. When I am feeling overwhelmed. And all I want to do is escape from everything.

So I play video games. Like, a lot.

And of course, I know this is the wrong strategy. I know that I would be better off steeling my nerves and turning to face my problems head on and dealing with them like a mature grown up type person.

But burying myself in distractions is so much easier and way less scary.

Meanwhile, life just keeps passing me by. I waste my life playing video games and get older and older and sadder and sadder and completely fail to have a life.

It’s too pathetic to be tragic.

I try to find the resources within myself to grow stronger and become more of a person. And there is growth of a sort, but it’s so very slow.

I could do so much in this world if I could only escape my mental cage. But there is no way of letting myself out without letting the world in, and all that cold hard fear inside me still won’t let me do it.

And over and over again, I dream of walking away from everything and starting over again somewhere where nobody knows me and I can reinvent myself.

I suppose one doesn’t have to walk away from one’s entire life to do that. I could find some promising local subculture and reinvent myself there.

Maybe some sort of kink scene. I don’t know.

Of course, I would have to face my social anxiety first. And that’s a mighty tall order. I think the only way I could pull it off would be to activate my kamikaze mode and go into it not giving a shit whether people like me or whether I am being obnoxious, and just concentrate on being true to myself and expressing myself fully, and let the chips fall where they may.

That’s probably the best attitude towards life in general, to be honest. Focusing a lot less on trying to control outcomes and far more on just being your true self.

You know. Just like all of society has been telling me since the day I was born.

But being true to yourself takes a leap of faith for someone like me precisely because the outcome can neither be predicted nor controlled. You have to just trust that being true to yourself will work out in your favour over time.

And that is a very large leap for me. I am used to a certain level of logical continuity in my thinking. A follows from B which leads to C and implies D, type thing.

The only word to describe what kind of mental or spiritual energy can let you jump from A all the way to P is “faith”.

And it doesn’t matter if everything clearly indicates P is a far, far better place to be.

Without a road leading from here to there, I can’t go.

More after the break.

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And here I am, as foretold. Back.

With, quite honestly, not a damn thing I feel like blogging about. Right now I am feeling lazy and self-indulgent and irresponsible.

Kind of like I am on vacation. From my total lack of job or school.

My life is very same-y.

And that’s a problem because, like I have said many times before, one of the basic facts of neurology is that repeated stimuli are tuned out by our nervous systems.

So if you are doing the same things over and over, those things become less and less stimulating and hence less and less real over time.

When you combine that with living in my computer most of the time, it’s a wonder that I have any sense of connection to reality left.

And truth be told, sometimes that connection gets mighty thin. And that makes my really anxious because it makes me feel like I am on the brink of total chaos and insanity. A state wherein my ultimate nightmare happens and I get trapped in my own mind, with no input from reality and no outlet to express myself.

Worst of all, no mental stimulation. The horror.

Luckily, I do get out three times a week or so. And while the world inside my computer is not a good substitute for interacting with reality, it does change and stimulate and make me engage with it interactively, so while it’s low on physical stimulation, it’s at least high in mental stimulation, and that helps.

And here, on my computer, I can feel safe. Or as close to safe as I ever do. I can do the one thing I know how to do, and that’s how to fill my mind with mental stimulation until there is no room left for worry or anxiety or self-loathing and achieve a level of comfort that makes the time pass quickly.

We’re going nowhere but we’re doing it at the speed of light.

Maybe what I need to do if I want to escape this poisoned candyland is set aside an hour a day to spend in solid reality.

That means not only not being on the computer, but not being in bed either. And no media consumption of any kind.

Even if all I do is sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the wall, it’s still time I am spending out of bed and out of my head.

It would also give me time to think and process all that mental stimulation, especially if I add in some form of meditation.

Of course, like most of my brilliant ideas, this probably won’t actually happen. I will finish writing this thing and think, “Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. ”

But nothing will come of it.

After all, the real problem is all this hate and rage and fear inside me that prevents me from doing things outside my tiny narrow corridor of safety.

Only hyper-predictability can keepo that shit at bay,.

And that’s why I feel like I am fading away.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.