You can tell I don’t know what to blog about when the title is that vague.

Did the comedy thang last Wednesday night. Tried doing it with zero prep. No joke list or anything. Just the thoughts in my head based on the latest news from Facebook.

That went about as well as you would think. Got five jokes or so out then drew a blank. So it was a brief performance.

But I scratched that crazy itch that said I should try that approach. And I am not giving up on it entirely. I still think it has some merit.

The idea is that by not having notes or anything with me, I can be more present and engaged with the audience.

And that’s my goal – to be connecting with the audience so I can engage them and make the best use of my gifts for oratory and my charm.

I also want to preserve the spontaneity of the material. I suppose ideally that would involve me simply improvising with the audience, but I am nowhere near that level of confidence, so for now, I write jokes.

But I can see a future in which I just show up with a few topics in mind and then just riff on them, plus the audience’s reactions to them.

But if I want to get to that point, it’s going to take a lot more work. I would have to write the jokes beforehand and (urk) memorize them.

I hate memorizing anything. And I have been able to get away with almost never having to do it because of my natural gifts.

I never had to memorize anything in school. I just remembered it.

But I suppose I wouldn’t necessarily have to memorize the jokes per se, just memorize a set list. Something I write down beforehand. Just a few words per joke to remind me of my material when my mind goes blank.

I continue to struggle to remember that when I am performing, I will be in an entirely different head space than when I am relaxed at home, and that I have to prepare for my performance with that in mind.

Scientifically speaking, what happens is that adrenaline hits my system and my mind responds by dumping everything out of my short term memory in order to free up resources to deal with the immediate situation.

Think a caveman being chased by a predator and you can see the wisdom in the system. The cavemen that were still thinking about the roast buffalo they had last night when being chased by a pack of wolves did not live long.

That’s also why so many people find their minds going blank when they sit down to take the big test.

I’ve never had that problem, but that’s because tests do not stress me out. I have always done well on them. If anything, I am excited to have something approaching an actual challenge to use my mighty brainpower on.

Anyhow, my point is that I have to go into doing standup knowing that my mind will shift gears and therefore I need to minimize the amount of data I need to remember.

Maybe then, I will be able to be the comedian I keep trying to be.

More after the break.

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On third genders

If you ever find yourself wondering whether or not gender is a social construct, just take a glance at the pages of history and read up on cultures with third genders.

One example would be pederastic cultures, the most infamous being the ancient Greeks. To them, “boy” was a gender. There were men, women, and boys. Men pursued woman for marriage and boys for romance and sex (more or less).

And the thing is, every man who pursued boys has once been a boy pursued by men. In that sense, there was equality, at least as viewed over time.

Another example would be cultures where there are men, women, and men who dress and live as women.

We will call these “two spirit” cultures for lack of a better catchall name for them.

Unlike pederasty, there are still many modern cultures where this is wisely and openly practiced. Parts of India include “two spirit” genders, and these third gender roles are not merely tolerated but have well defined and important roles in that society.

So clearly, a society can function perfectly well without our rather quaint and provincial (and quite recent) notions of a gender binary and gender specific attributes.

And yet, violence against gender nonconformists is rampant worldwide. Being nonbinary means you are many more times more likely to be a victim of violence than the more traditionally gendered, up to and very much including murder.

What makes people so damned angry?

I say that what makes people murderously angry is the ambiguity. Ambiguity leads to uncertainty and uncertainty, for some, leads to great anger.

In the two example I listed above, the third gender has a clearly defined role in society. They are a known quantity, and people know how to interact with them and what sort of things to expect from them.

But alas, for the innocent gender nonconformists in modern societies, there are as yet no clearly defined roles for them and no well established expectations as to what they are like or what to expect from them.

And while they themselves have developed a flexible notion of gender by way of necessity, other members of their society remain stuck in the gender binary and therefore the presence of nonconformists causes them acute social stress.

They feel conflicted. Some signs point one way, some the other. They have to come up with some way to resolve this ambiguity or the cognitive dissonance will kill them.

Unfortunately, the most basic and primitive response to pain is to attack the perceived source of that pain, no matter how innocent that person might be.

Clearly, what is needed is a reimagining of gender to include those who fall between genders and who only want to live their lives in peace and safety.

A well defined third gender role would be a good start. But it’s hard to imagine how such a thing would be created.

We will just have to fall back on the foundation of all modern society, tolerance.

You be you, and I’ll be me, and we will judge one another individually. See?

It’s really not that complicated at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I signed up for a social network for people with depressed.

Here what I wrote in the “My Story” section of my profile.

Depression has claimed my entire adult life and I am 46. And I was depressed before that as well. Basically I have had two years free of depression, when I went to college, and then my parents pulled the plug on that by defunding it. And because they took early retirement, I couldn’t get a student loan for a year and a half after that, and by then, I was far too depressed to care. Plus all my friends had graduated. I was raped by a stranger when I was 4 years old. I have never had a job, never supported myself, never been in a relationship, and I have almost never dated or had decent sex. Basically, I live in my computer. I sit here all day, playing video games and blogging my 1000 words a day. I have no actual life and I doubt I will ever have one. I try not to hate myself but it’s hard to avoid it when I have so much internalized anger. Every day is a struggle despite the utter lack of challenge in my life, and there are times when I want to just walk away from everything, find some place where nobody knows me, and start over.

My life sucks. I deserve more than merely making it through the day.

But all I can do is go to therapy once a week, work on myself via journaling. and hope that some day I will be free.

And this is what I wrote as my first post :

The darkness never sleeps. Even in my dreams, I’m depressed. Self-loathing follows me like a haunted satellite, always up there, looking down on me, ready to strike. It takes iron discipline to keep it at bay and even then sometimes it overwhelms me. My soul seethes with the rage I can neither contain of express, so it just builds up underneath my consciousness like pressure in a volcano. To calm myself, I contemplate the Void.

It soothes me.

Maybe some day I will be nothing too.

1240

That’s… pretty damned good imagery. There is the makings of a pretty decent poem in there. I am especially proud of the phrase “haunted satellite”.

Well they say you should write what you know.

I would have been so popular back when Emo was a thing.

Anyhow, I was a little surprised at what came out of me. I had no idea that I had such bitterness and rage on tap, just waiting for an outlet.

In retrospect, it’s obvious, but at the time I was a bit taken aback. Not just that I had all this inside me but that it came out in such a well articulated form.

Guess I am getting pretty good at this whole writing thing.

One thing that “helped” was the fact that when I was signing up for this place (mydepressionteam.com), under “Life situation” there was no option for my actual life situation at all.

They had working full time, working part time, student full time, student part time, stay at home mother, stay at home father, and “other”.

Well I am unemployed and not raising children. So that makes me an “other”.

They literally “othered” me.

Then the website itself irritated me because it all seemed so phony and artificial and faux-cheerful and reminded me of everything I can’t stand about most mental health providers. And it brought up something else.

It brought up my misgivings about being understood. The place did not make me feel like it was a safe place where I could be myself and express how I truly feel.

Instead, it made me feel like it was yet another place that would in no way be able to handle my darkness or comprehend what I am going through or even understand what the fuck I was saying.

So it would be just another vapid echo chamber of mindless support from people who don’t have the slightest idea who or what I am. Just like group therapy.

And that… I do not need.

Still, I am not giving up on the place yet. Might be some real individuals who are able to pick up what I am putting down out there.

Or at least who are willing to engage with what they don’t understand.

But let’s just say I have had my expectations realigned.

More after the break.

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A pretty interesting Reddit thread video :

it’s a great question, once you wrap your head around it. In the current age, the idea that you can get through life without using a computer is laughable.

But I remember when only nerds knew how to “program” (in other words, use) a computer and the idea of anyone else even wanting one was laughable.

Hard to imagine these days, when everyone has a smartphone in their pocket that is a million times more powerful than the supercomputers of my youth.

I would say the closest I have to one of those for right now is that I refuse to use the self-checkout lane at grocery stores.

Not because I fear the evil red barcode scanner light, of course. To me, they seem like they involve a lot of work, do not save me any time, and put people out of a job.

Relatedly, my insistence on doing everything in cash might be seen as rather outmoded in this era where everyone pays for everything with a card.

But I come by it honest. My grandfather, my Pepe, ran his entire business that way. And he sold electronics, so there was a lot of moolah in that wallet.

Me, I like cash because it’s simple, direct, universally accepted, and if I want to know my current “balance” I just take out my wallet and count it.

Plus, I don’t have to pay a third party for the privilege of paying the second party.

There is no access fee for cash. YET.

I am not unaware of the advantages of the card based lifestyle. There are efficiencies involved, especially now that all you have to do is tap your card against the reader, but these have never struck me as being worth the cost.

However, what something costs is always relative to one’s income, and it’s not impossible that were I to secure a better income, my position would change.

But even then, I might cheat by keeping track of my balance on a piece of paper, like something out of an old-fashioned checkbook.

Remember those? I never liked using checks myself. Another case where cash is just so much easier.

Nobody demands to see two different forms of ID for cash.

And I know that I am just entering the phase of life where these things start to crop op. So I am bound to fail to adopt future technologies too.

OMG, I almost forgot the biggest one : I don’t have a cellphone.

Why would I? I’m always home!

So I suppose my true crime against being current is still having a landline.

In my mind, phone numbers belong to locations, not devices.

And I know that is terribly, terribly old-fashioned of me and I suppose that one day, landlines won’t be a thing any more and I will have to adapt.

But until then, it’s cash and landlines for me.

Oh and books! Real, actual, physical books!

I guess there’s just no hope for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Using my asthma inhaler is surprisingly tricky.

Not complicated at all. You exhale. then start breathing in and then press the thing down so it disperses your puff of Ventolin as you’re inhaling, then hold your breath for ten seconds or so to let the medicine do its job, then exhale.

Then do all that again, in my case.

And yet I am having trouble getting the hang of it. The sequence is simple but getting it to both clear my tongue and go deeply into my lungs is proving to be irritating.

I will get the hang of it if I just keep trying, I am sure.

But there’s a learning curve.

I am feeling fairly good today. No dark ocean of depression sloshing around in my brain and in my bloodstream and plunging me into despair.

And that’s nice.

Having a lot of fun with Divinity : Original Sin 2. It’s a really great game now that I have gotten the hang of it.

I made it to the final fight (I hope) of Chapter 2, and it was pretty hard. Then a giant interdimensional horror worm type monster showed up out of nowhere and then it was REALLY hard. So I decided to go explore a bit to cool off and think about it.

I honestly didn’t expect to find much. As far as I knew, I had done pretty much everything there was to do before the final fight. I was really just expecting to maybe find a few enemies I had missed and maybe a bit of gold.

But then I just… kept…. finding things.

It was really quite magical. Turns out I had missed loads of content, and just by wandering around I ended up leveling up my party and getting mad loot.

But the best part was getting skills and spells I had missed by going around and checking out everyone’s items for sale.

See, the game doesn’t have dedicated vendors. Instead, you can trade with nearly every character by pressing the trade button when you are talking to them.

I knew this from the start but I had been so busy doing all the plot stuff that I had only sporadically checked out what people had for sale.

When I went on my little cooling off mission, I started checking every character I could find for what they had for sale, and found out some of them had a ton of awesome stuff.

So when I finally returned to that final fight, I was way more powerful. Still lost a few times due to dumb fuckups, and when I finally did win it was way closer than it should have been due to more dumb fuckups, but I did it, then saved the game and quit it so I could eat and blog.

And now I have the fun of going back to the game and looting the corpses, leveling up, and moving on with the plot.

Amazing how much that improves my mood.

More after the break.

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Wow. Just finished a couple of hours of DOS2 gameplay and shit’s gone all cosmic.

I looted all the kewl loots from the corpses lying around after my big fight and managed to actually get on the frigging ship I was fighting to get on, the Lady Vengeance.

Am I the only one who wonders why there an “a” in vengeance? Probably.

Anyhow, I get on to the frigging ship, but not before doing a whole thing where I am in the land of the dead and talking to a goddess who seems nice in a beatifically maternal way but then starts talking about how I am her chosen one and it must be me who ascends to Divinity and not one of the other gods’ chosen ones and suddenly I am not so sure about this lady.

So then I am on the ship, and it turns out the ship is a whole thing. Mostly just dialogue and looting. Eventually I find the book with the magic book which lets me talk to the ship (don’t ask) and just as I am thinking, “Finally, freedom!”, the baddies catch up to us and there’s this whole big fight where I have to protect this one person and the first time I try, I don’t make it, but the second time I do, and god damn it, here I am in the land of the dead and now all seven gods are hanging from some kind of tree that is sucking the life out of them and I have no idea WTF to do.

Turns out I had to use the Bless power given to me by the crazy goddess on said crazy goddess and we go through the whole “I seem beatific but then I am all crazy and fanatical” thing AGAIN, and then I ended up back on our boat but still in the Land of the Dead, and that’s where I signed off to let my brain cool down a while.

And I am so not thrilled to be caught up in the affairs of gods again. I got sick and tired of that when I was playing Pillars of Eternity 2 : Deadfire. Every other minute, the gods ae barging in to whisk you way to their realm to talk with you in that game, and it really gets to be a pain in the ass.

I didn’t ask to be your avatar, gods dammit. Leave me to adventure in peace!

But at least in this game (DOS2) , there is the possibility of becoming a god. And that sounds interesting. But I am totally not down with the whole “crush all those who oppose us because we are RIGHT and they must be DESTROYED” scene.

I am guessing that whatever evil is killing the gods is also pushing them into fighting amongst another with fanatical zeal.

Whatever. I am not falling for it. I will take the Federation (from Star Trek) route every time. Maximize cooperation. minimize conflict. communicate honestly, and so on.

In other words. I will remain true to my own values no matter what. Even in video games where I could power trip like crazy, all I want to do is help people and advance the greater good however I can.

That’s not just what I believe. It’s who I am.

But then again, those are practically the same thing.

And that’s the only way I know how to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just came back from an appointment with my GP.

He says my symptoms match some of the symptoms of asthma. I am highly dubious. He prescribed me a puffer. I am not keen on this idea.

Generally speaking, I don’t like it when I leave the doctor’s office having to learn to use some scary new thing. I have a lot of (mostly irrational) fears about my ability to do stuff in the real world, especially when they are new and not part of my existing skillset, and this asthma puffer business fits that to a T.

Still, I am happy that I was assertive enough to ask for clarification when the pharmacist said “Two puffs four times a day as needed”.

I said “So that’s two puffs…. ”

He interrupted me to repeat himself. I held up my hand to stop him and said “So is that two puffs at a time, or….”

I am quite proud of that. I advocated for myself quite well there. Turns out the answer is no, you do one puff, wait a minute, then do another.

Overall, I have been feeling more assertive lately. I think I have reached a place where I can accept a certain amount of crankiness in myself when it is justified.

And it’s definitely justified sometimes. Like when people are being idiots.

Now I do not believe I have asthma. That’s absurd. I just looked up adult onset asthma and I do have a few of the symptoms but none of the rest and a two factor diagnosis for something this complex is highly suspect at best.

However, all the puffer does is dilate my lung’s airways, and it’s hard to imagine how that could hurt me, so I will give it a shot anyhow.

I will be back with fresh reportage after I give my puffer a try.

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After carefully reading the instructions, I then did it wrong two times.

The first time was not so bad. I was supposed to start breathing in, then spray, and I sprayed first then breathed in.

But tghe second time I was totally not holding the thing right and blasted myself on the tongue instead of breathing it in.

Oops. I blotted at much of it as I could off my tongue with a Kleenex as fast as I could beause the booklet says “Do not swallow” and that seems like the sort of advice it would be foolish to ignore.

So I probably derived no real medical benefit from the second puff but I am not sure I want to re-try it right away.

I can definitely feel something going on in my lungs, and it feels pretty nice. Feels like things have really opened up in there and I am breathing easier.

So, so far so good.

My tongue is all tingly now, though.

Oh, and we didn’t discuss my joint stiffness at all.

Once more in my life, I have gone to the doctor, presented them with my list of symptoms, they have run some tests, and then looked at me and said “I have no idea, because according to these, you are healthy. ”

So I have to ask myself, am I imagining things, or are they incompetent?

It’s probably both.

More after the break.

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The puffer definitely has me feeling better.

But part of that is that I now feel quite sleepy. Which is a bit of a bother because I am to be at Subway in two hours, at 8 pm, which means being ready by 7:45 pm, which means being in the shower by 7:30 PM, and I have to finish my blogging before then, and that does not leave a lot of time for napping.

An hours tops. If I am lucky.

It doesn’t help that the heat just kicked in, so I am experiencing The Melt too.

All I really want to do right now is sleep for a couple of years. I am honestly pondering begging off of Subway, and I love Subway.

But I could really use some sleep right now. I guess getting my blood oxygen up has made my brain declare it to be napping time and I don’t get a freaking vote.

Meanwhile, in the real world…. ooh, that should be the name of something I do.

Anyhow. Meanwhile, in the real world, the USA is on the brink of war with Iran. Personally, I don’t think it will happen. Neither the House nor the Senate want it, most of the population doesn’t want it, even Trump-heads don’t want it, and the US military sure as fuck don’t want it.

What I think will end up happening is that someone will finally successfully challenge that blank check for war that Dubya got after 9/11 and it will go down in flames.

The Founders made it pretty clear that they did not want the President to be able to declare war (or whatever they call it on paper) on his or her own.

Plus Nancy Pelosi and some other person are sponsoring a bill to defund the war even before it happens.

But hey, Dumb Donnie. You can still have your war.

You just have to pay for it yourself.

After all, you ARE a billionaire…. right?

Of course, anything the House does has to get past Mitch the Bitch Mcconell, historicl villain and enemy of democracy, first.

But he is not totally immune to political pressure, and if he ends up being the only one who can stop a hugely unpopular, expensive, and ill-advised war, he might just defy his terrapin nature and stand up for himself for a change, and vote nay.

Meanwhile, Australia is burning. Half a billion animals dead already, and some of them weren’t even venomous.

I see your entrenched evil, Koch Brothers, and raise you dead koalas.

Your move, you evil motherfuckers. Try to deny your part in this catastrophe. My hope is that soon, being a climate change denier will be roughly akin to being a drug-dealing pedophile Nazi in terms of social consequences.

And rest assured that when the rest of the world starts to burn, we the people will be coming for everyone we can blame it on and heads will roll.

And the first ones to roll will be yours.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This article makes me happy for several reasons.

First, it confirms to me that the world grasps that it’s fight, flight, or FREEZE. That means the world had caught up to me. I realized there was a third response when I was still a kid.

I call it the “hide” response, but that doesn’t alliterate, so I will defer to theirs.

Until I read the article, I had only ever heard it as “a fight or flight response”. But take it from me, when I isolate myself from the world and play video games all day, I am not fighting the world and any fleeing from it is already over.

I hide from the world and choose instead to live in the world inside my computer, which is much less loud and scary.

Anyhow, it’s the 4th response we are here to discuss today and according to the article, the 4th response is “fawn”.

Again, I would say “placate” instead, but that also does not alliterate.

I have to admit, “fight, flight, hide, or placate” doesn’t roll off the tongue.

Now I am not fully sold on “fawn” being a 4th adrenal response. It works great in a human context, but that’s because we’re a highly social species.

Other critters are more solitary and therefore “fawning” does not apply. Fawning inherently implies someone to fawn over, after all.

Still, it’s sensible enough in a human context, and in said context I think it adds very important insight to our understanding of human nature.

Prayer, for example, is fawning, as are all other forms of “sucking up”.

In my own life, I have had dark thoughts about my own super nice nature and whether or not it is, at its root, an attempt to control my world via placating it.

And there is some truth to that. I don’t think it’s the main reason I like being a nice person – the main reason is that I love doing it and get a lot of joy from the marvelous empathic loop of positive emotions projected and received that being nice can bring about when it is working.

But when you are the youngest of four kids and your closest sibling is four and a third years older than you, you have to develop your soft power.

And in my case, part of my soft power was being lovable and cute. And to this day, that’s a big part of my nature and the dominant force in my social instincts.

I want people to like me. Love me, even. This is often at odds with the crankier and more severe sides of my personality.

I suppose it might seem confusing to someone who meets me when I am being cute and funny to then encounter me when I am being passionately ideological or when I am being a logical purist or even when I am being your friendly neighborhood pervert.

All I can say is that I am all those things and many more, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t know how to make them all add up to one person either.

But I am working on it.

More after the break.

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Another eminently bloggable thing from Facebook :

This resembles me a lot.

Here’s my version :

You know what?

Sometimes I do seem like an alien to regular folk.

And that’s fine. It doesn’t disqualify me for entry in the human race like I have believed. People can deal with weird people as long as they aren’t weird about it – in other words, people can shrug off a strange comment or something they can’t relate to. What they can’t shrug off is my treating it like I just shit in their purse.

The people who love me know I am from outer space. And they still love me.

Wow, that felt good to write. I could probably write about ten more of them, each covering something else I need to hear from myself, but that’s the big one.

The OP made me realize that I don’t need to live in fear of those moments of alienation when I try to get along with normal folk and I am trying hard but they just do not get me and I fail to connect with them.

There are much worse things than failing to connect. And sure, those moments of failed connection are painful when they happen, especially considering how lonely and desperate for connection I am, but they are not the end of the world.

It’s even possible that if I just kept trying, I would connect with people eventually. And even if I didn’t, there’s no reason that has to be an indictment against who I am as a person and whether or not I am fit to be around people.

It’s true that I am not like other people. Can’t deny that. But who cares? Lots of people are not like other people. Most of the interesting ones aren’t, that’s for sure.

And yeah, I can be a bit too much for people sometimes, and come on too strong, or try too hard, or barge my way into conversations with all the grace of a pushy hippo, etc.

But nobody is perfect. I have a lot of good points too. I am sweet and funny and weird and a lot of fun to be around.

The most important thing is that none of my flaws are a secret to those who love me. They know all these things about me and they love me anyway.

Clearly, in their minds, the positives vastly outweigh the negatives and I know depression makes my own perspective on myself quite suspect, so I choose to defer to their judgment instead.

After all, they know better than me.

So that’s settled. I’m one heck of a guy. I have nothing to be ashamed of, there is no reason for me to beat myself up, and I can rest easy knowing I am one cool dude.

I’ll never hate myself again!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty fucking depressed right now.

Hopefully the food I am eating will help. Low blood sugar is enough to make anyone feel the blues. Luckily, it is easy (and tasty) to treat.

Thing is, I know it’s just the usual chemical bullshit. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing has actually changed except the neurochemical balance of my brain. Pretty soon, the flood waters will retreat and I will feel better.

Still not great. But better.

Knowing that doesn’t make it go away, though. I still feel terrible. I feel overwhelmed by life and want to hide in a deep dark hole till it all goes away.

Or at least until I am not so freaked out about everything.

Oh well. I got food, I got meds, I got like five hours before we do Denny’s. That’s plenty of time for my antidepressants to kick in and hopefully drain the depression from my mind and leave me some life worth living.

Because right now, everything seems scary and overwhelming and weird and hostile. My head hurts and my joints ache and my lungs are scratchy and heavy inside and I really could use a nice long quiet cuddle with someone who loves me.

Or at least a few hours more sleep. But that, I have to earn by at least getting the first half of my daily blogging done.

Right now, it is taking a lot of my small supply of energy to keep typing away. The words are not coming to me easily, and being me is not very fun right now.

But that will change. It always does.

It’s just the weather.

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Speaking of the weather, holy frick is it windy out there. Makes me glad to be inside.

Wish it wasn’t so loud, though. And it makes the building shake, which always unsettles me a bit.

Buildings are not supposed to tremble.

But what the hell. At least I am not in Australia trying to survive the inferno right now.

It helps to be grateful for the small things like that.

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There’s something deeply wrong with my approach to life. I have been trying to figure out what the problem is a lot lately.

It’s like I am always trying to stay warm under a blanket that is way too small to cover me. So some of me is always sticking out into the cold and I can never get warm enough to truly relax and feel safe.

I think I would be far better off if I (metaphorically) stood up, wrapped the blanket around myself like a garment, and headed off into the world in search of someplace warm and friendly and nice.

There has to be a place in the world where I could shine. Someplace where I can make a living and have some kind of purpose and meaning and content to my life.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, with all this power at my command.

That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?

I could do so much if I was free.

What I really need is an escape plan.

More after the break.

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All right, time to write 478 words in 27 minutes. No problem.

Go words go!

Feeling better than I did earlier. I’ve gotten some more (sweaty and disturbed) sleep since then and that helped a fair bit.

So did eating and taking my meds. So, I was right on all three counts there.

I’ve been pondering what sort of force could take me out of my current life and put me somewhere where I might thrive as opposed to merely staying alive.

And apart from divine intervention (unlikely) or my being able to do it myself (same), the only thing I can imagine doing it is some kind of mentor figure. Someone who sees my plight, agrees that it’s a tragic waste of human potential, and is both willing and able to work with me till we find me a place in the sun that I can call home.

Someone who thinks I am worth investing time and energy into, and has both the will and the resources to do so in a way that gets me ahead in life.

Not sure if I am looking for a mentor, an agent, or a boyfriend. Or maybe what I am really looking for is a father.

But, you know, a good one, not like the one I got saddled with.

I know that whoever took on that role would not find it to be an easy job. They would have to be willing to get tough with me when I am slacking off. That is not going to be easy because I have a natural ability to be sympathetic.

As well as just plain pathetic. Ha ha ha.

Luckily, said person would not have to beat me with a cudgel in order to get me to work. I don’t have a problem with doing what I am told and going where I am sent. What I need most of all is guidance and emotional support – someone to tell me where to go and what to do when I get there. Someone who is also capable of talking me down when I am anxious and pumping me up when I am depressed.

I can’t do this for myself. If I could, I would be doing it as we speak. I need some kind of outside force to inspire me to pull myself together and get to work on myself.

I need to feel like I am not all alone in the world any more. That someone is taking an active interest in me and my outcomes and is willing to invest their own mental resources and time in me because they believe in me.

I love my friends, but what I need is more than our little coterie of intellectual depressives can provide. I need someone stronger and healthier than me to show the way and help me along the path.

I wish I could be the parent I have always needed for myself,. but that’s not logically possible. I am only one person. I can only be what I am.

And that’s just plain not enough any more.

So where would I go to find a mentor? Or an agent?

I have no fucking clue.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Finished with nine minutes to spare!

By usual rugged optimism about the world situation is not doing so well right now.

Australia’s an inferno. Half a billion animals dead. Koalas. Kangaroos. You name it. All dead, dead, dead forever.

Ya know, this could be it folks. The beginning of the end. Australia could just be the canary in the coal mine. These could be the days we look back to with painful nostalgia as the Last Good Days, before everything started truly going to Hell. We could be the people who we will look back at and curse for not doing more about climate change. This could be a Golden Age…. the last one we will have for a long time.

In the future, the whole world could be like Australia. Everything burning, burning, burning down to the ground.

The U.S. is gunning for war in Iran. Hope Trump’s people know how alone the USA will be if it comes to that. Trump clearly doesn’t. Or maybe he doesn’t even care because he is only doing this to distract people from impeachment.

Not gonna work, Dumb Donnie. You can distract the people but the wheels of justice continue to turn and your impeachment trial is going to start real soon now and there is not a god damned thing you can do about it.

I know, Donnie. Talk about starting up the draft again. See how that works out.

I dare ya ta do it, Donnie.

As for me, I found these two lesions on my right big toe today. What the fuck. So this could be the end of the good times for me too.

Anything that happens on your skin is a bad sign in diabetes. It’s always a sign of something going pretty frigging wrong. Must be all that maple syrup thick blood in my veins wreaking havoc on my body.

Anything weird happening with your feet is also cause for alarm. The bad circulation caused by diabetes can be especially rough on your hands and feet. They taught us how to check them regularly in my diabetes class.

Which was aborted partway through, by the way. The teacher had some kind of family crisis and had to leave early. So i got ripped off there too, as did the dozen or so other people in the class.

Doubt it would have made any difference anyhow. Depression would keep myself from taking proper care of myself even if I was a god damned endocrinologist.

I mean, here I sit, eating like a goddamned toddler and getting virtually no exercise at all while my own personal Australia burns down around me.

This is fine.

Part if me is trying to raise the alarm by being alarmed. But my depression can always thump that part of me into submission with a giant brick of total apathy.

I don’t care. Nothing matters. I will just lay here on the railroad tracks until the train hits me. Then I will finally escape.

Nothing to do now but entertain myself and try to get through with as little pain as I can.

Like I am in hospice.

That sounds nice around now.

---

My KFC is ordered. Now we play the waiting game.

A : Say, how do you play the waiting game?
B : You wait. Not much of a game, really.

Hospice care does sound nice, when you think about it. Everyone is super nice and understanding and sweet to you and does everything they possibly can to make you comfortable and happy and to keep things peaceful and calm and pleasant.

It’s just a shame you have to die eventually. You know…. at the end.

There must be people who have been in hospice for an embarrassingly long time. Imagine the incredibly awkward conversation that might lead to.

“Shortest Straw” Nurse : Listen, you have been here for over two years, and there’s only so many beds in the hospice, and we have quite a long waiting list, and…

Sweet Old Lady : And what, dear?

Nurse : And well…. it’s come to a point where we have to transfer you back to the ICU, and that costs a lot of money and paperwork…. so if you could just… you know…. .

Old Lady : ….die already? Is that what you are trying to say, dear?

Nurse blushes with relief and shame and nodnods.

Old Lady : Look, I am as surprised as you are that I am still here. If you think this is awkward for you, imagine how it is for me. It’s been almost a year since I said all my goodbyes to all my friends and relatives, my kids have taken out high interest loans against their inheritances, and my insurance guy keeps coming in and tapping his watch at me and giving me dirty looks….

I have a fun brain.

Other than that, hospice is like an oral retentive wet dream. Everything is geared towards your needs. You don’t have to lift a finger and everything is done for you.

Plus you get all the best drugs. Really good stuff.

Because what’s the worst that could happen?

Granted, if you’re not rich, you won’t exactly be living in the lap of luxury. But if your needs are modest, you could be very comfortable living that way.

Or rather, dying that way.

Well there’s always a catch, isn’t there?

---

In case you hadn’t figured this out yet, I am pretty depressed today.

And anxious. In many ways, depression is an over-correction for anxiety. You lose the anxiety but it gets replaced by feeling lonely and tiny and afraid and alone.

Not sure which is worse, to be honest. The anxiety, I suppose.

Depression is certainly much calmer.

But who knows. If I was more anxious that depressed, maybe I would be a crazy overachiever like my sister Catherine and not the empty locker of a person that I am in my current life.

Or at least that’s how I feel. I know the outside world might not agree, and I would love to go live in the reality where that isn’t true.

But i am stuck in the world where I feel terrible from time to time and there is not a god damned thing I can do about it.

How very depressing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been playing a ton more Divinity : Original Sin 2. And dying a lot.

Hence YWDAL. That stands for You Will Die A Lot. I’ve noticed that there are some games where dying fairly often is just part of the game and there is no real way to avoid it, especially when you first start out, so you just have to get used to it.

And I am sure there are people for whom that is a dealbreaker. In fact, I am doubly sure because I used to be one of them. When I was a more depressed and therefore ill individual, I couldn’t handle any game where failure is an integral part of the experience and would avoid games like that while complaining bitterly about it being too hard.

While also being too proud to play on easy mode. Ironic.

And that was such a “loser” attitude. There were a lot of games I might have not just enjoyed but profited from on a personal level if I had just stuck around long enough to learn to play them.

Don’t ask for specific examples. This isn’t that kind of article.

Luckily, I am stronger and saner and healthier now, and so I can play YWDAL type games and call upon my innate bloody minded stubbornness to keep me in the game long enough to learn it.

For example, I am slowly getting better at DOS2. It’s been a bit of a steep learning curve because the turn based combat has a lot of complex dynamics that are new to me and I seem to learn them one at a time, so it’s taking a while.

And part of it is just a matter of learning the terrain. I wasted a whole bunch of time this morning trying to do fights that were way beyond my team’s capabilities merely because I went through the first door I found instead of looking around the previous floor where I was supposed to go.

That stubbornness cuts both ways. If I had been less focused on trying to win impossible fights, I would have thought to check out the rest of the previous floor sooner and saved myself a lot of aggravation.

Tunnel vision. It’s a chronic problem for us deep focus types.

So is wandering off the point. What was I talking about again?

Oh right. YWDAL games.

Obviously, persisting despite failing a lot pertains to a hell of a lot more than video games. In order to get good at anything, you have to endure being bad at it at first. Life cannot be lived on easy mode.

But a lot of us who are former “gifted” kids fall into the trap of comparing everything to how easy things were for us in school compared to the other kids and never getting the clue update that says “No, that was then, and this is now, and now you have to try harder to get the same results. ”

Even if we do realize this, it’s all too easy to declare that to be (somehow) unfair and refuse to change, instead opting to refuse to try until the world (somehow) goes back to being that easy again.

Not gonna happen. Grow the fuck up.

Working on it.

More after the break.

---

And we’re off! Lets see if I can finish blogging before we leave for Subway.

Honestly, my odds are 50/50 at best.

Been playing more DOS2, of course. Turned out that other way I thought I could go ended abruptly in a locked hatch that only opens from the other side. Bummer.

On the other hand, I got past the room full of killer dogs by using a red rubber ball, which was cute AF. And I thought I would have to fight this super nasty wizard called The Flenser next, but yay. I could sneak right past him.

And the next door led to the outside world, and freedom! Of a sort.

I’m in the middle of a nasty swamp with undead all around me, but still. it’s nice for me and my party to breathe free again.

Still have those collars that block our special powers on, though. Those are going to have to go. Some of these special powers sound pretty cool.

Like my can summon a wolf with his soul. How cool is that?

Also found out I had a resurrection scroll I had forgotten about, so I was able to raise my pal Fane the “Eternal” from the dead.

Even though he’s undead. And from a race called the Eternals. He can still die.

Bit of a ripoff there, if you ask me. But I suppose an unkillable character would muck up the game balance a wee bit.

After reviving Fane the So Called Eternal, I immediately dismissed him in favour of adding a dwarf called Beast to the party as a thief.

You see, you can’t dismiss a dead character from your party because the only way to dismiss a character is to talk to them and barring a seance, I can’t talk to the dead.

So I revived Fane only to tell him to please fuck off now, thanks buh-bye.

Which means my party lacks a full time mage now. But Fane wasn’t really pulling his weight anyhow. His magic was okay but not great.

And now we have a thief to pick locks and backstab people.

101 words to go. Time to put the pedal to the metal.

They have this thing in the game where if you meet up with any of the six main characters and decide you want them in your party, you get to pick what class they are.

Which kind of makes class seem meaningless and arbitrary. Apparently, in this world,. anyone can do any job, but they only get to pick once.

Each character has a “correct” class in the sense that it’s the class they have when you meet them. So far, everyone is the “wrong” class except Fane.

And I kicked him out.

It’s a dog’s life in this army, that’s for sure.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I had something very cool and emo and cathartic and poetic I was going to use for a title for this blog entry, but I’ve forgotten it.

So whatever. Moving on.

It’s Therapy Thursday. Talked about testosterone with Doctor Costin. He suggested that I ask my GP, Doctor Kelvin Chao, about getting my testosterone level checked, and I need to go back to him to tell him the antibiotics didn’t work anyhow, so I made an appointment for 2:15 pm next Tuesday and I will bring it up there.

I figure that the odds are pretty low that I have “low T”, as certain internet ads have discreetly dubbed it, and even if it is, I know that that human endocrine system is extremely complex and messing with it can backfire spectacularly, so I am not sure how keen I am in messing with it even if my level is a bit low.

But if it’s very low, I will go for it. If there’s a chance that a testosterone shot would chase these clouds away and let me feel warm and alive and happy, I have to go for it o matter what the risks are.

Cause something, somewhere has to give.

I can’t go on living this way. The days are fine – I can get through them fine. But only at the expense of my weeks, months, and years.

I want to do a lot more than merely survive the day. I want to make progress. I want to feel like I am getting somewhere.

I want to get some kind of life before I turn 50. If I turn 50.

I need another source of structure outside myself. The great thing about going to school was that all I had to do was catch the bus, metaphorically speaking. Once I was actually attending, the structure was provided for me and all I had to do was keep riding.

So I need something like that. And I am not as opposed to the idea of going back to school as I used to be.

But this time it would have to be for something practical and needed. Something with computers, probably, as I have the aptitude for that.

I’ve just lacked the interest. But I am sure I could learn to do system administration or something like that if I wanted to.

I am good with systems.

I don’t think I could be a programmer. My brain can work along those lines, but it really does not want to. It’s just too fussy and abstract for me.

And in a weird way, really depressing.

But I am pretty sure I could design software. I love design and I could see myself having the ability to design sleek and intuitive interfaces and work out the necessary logic in order to make things work how people naturally think they will work.

I would just need programmers to do the actual nuts and bolts programming for me.

Story of my life, really. That’s the problem with being a top-level thinker. You always need others to do the actual work.

Like being an architect. It’s a very difficult and demanding job and yet without a construction company, those blueprints are just a waste of paper.

Makes trying to be a literary writer seem more appealing. Sure, it’s a very tough racket to get into, but at least if I write a short story, I then have that short story.

It’s done, it’s finished, it’s a fait accompli. It doesn’t need others to execute it.

It might never get published, but at least it’s done.

More after the break.

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Let’s talk about this. I think it’s important. :

When I first encountered this sentiment, I instantly intuited how earth shattering and liberating it was, but I didn’t think it applied to me.

After all, I was a coaster, not a keener like my sister Catherine. High achievement was never a goal of mine. I didn’t sweat tests or labor long hours over assignments. I never ever tried to be perfect. I didn’t argue with teachers over a few percentage points on a test (well, not often). I didn’t suck up to my teachers,

And it would be nice to say that I didn’t do those things because of just how awesome and cool and ruggedly individualistic I am, but we all know that the real reason I didn’t do any of that was because I didn’t have to.

The high achievement came naturally to me. I have half-assed my way to straight A’s for my entire life. I barely broke a sweat.

So surely that meant that I didn’t need this warning about how dangerous a combination that perfectionism and depressions can make. Right?

But no, I need to hear this too, and as often as it takes for it to truly sink in, because one of the creative challenges I have faced is making peace with the fact that the finished product is never as good as the version in my mind.

That can stop a spiritually weak person like myself because it can convince us that there is no point in trying if all it leads to is disappointment.

\But no. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. That is especially true in the creative fields because doing it badly is the only route to doing it well.

For me, that means just writing and writing every day without any thought as to whether it is good enough. Doesn’t matter. It is what I needed to write at that time on that day and that’s enough.

Plus, I know that every word I write makes me a better writer. Exercising and expanding the part of brain that turns thoughts and emotions into words is always worth doing.

And the better I get at it, the more fully and completely convey what is in my mind, my heart, and my soul, and the more liberated I become.

And one day, I swear, I will be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…warm? form? worm? Something like that.

My point is that I have a new game I enjoy playing. Like I said I was doing to do yesterday, I got Divinity : Original Sin 2 once my money went from “pending” to “available for spending”.

And so far, it’s pretty good. Very much in the tradition of other good games like Neverwinter Nights, or Baldur’s Gate 2, or Dragon Age Origins.

It’s what they call an “isometric” RPG, with turn based combat, and that is a style of game that suits me well.

I just finished the first chapter of the game, which was also kind a tutorial, as is tradition. So far, the game has no weird new mechanics to throw me off and my character’s abilities are pretty damned cool, so, not bad.

Of course, before I did anything I had to go through character creation, and that is always somewhat tense the first time because you have to make decisions that will impact your entire first playthrough when you haven’t even played the game yet.

I had the choice of either choosing one of the pre-made main characters of the game or creating my own, and I chose to use one of the premade ones in order to cut down on potential options and because I figured that would be more fun the first time through.

So I am a lizard-person known as The Red Prince.

Because he’s a prince. And red.

And so far, I’m kind of a dick, in a prissy and amusing way. My character is a spoiled aristocrat and used to getting what he wants, but got arrested for being something called a Sourcerer, able to use Source magic (whatever that is), and thus believed to attract evil creatures known as the Voidwoken.

The original plan was for my character to be sent, along with the other main characters, to the no doubt ironically named Fort Joy, but then a crazy witch woman detonated some kind of spell that killed everyone on board and then a towering Cthulu-ish sea monster destroyed the ship I was on.

And thus ended the action-packed spectacular that was the first chapter. I have washed ashore and no doubt adventure awaits me.

The game is well drawn and richly illustrated and so far, the voice acting is top notch.

I think I am going to like this game. Which is a relief because I would have been embarrassed to return a THIRD game.

The game scores 95 percent with the critics on Metacritic AND 9 out of 10 with the users of the site.

I am paying extra attention to User Score after the debacle with Red Dead Redemption 2. From now on, if the critics love it but the fans hate it, I am going to consider that a major red flag.

Seems obvious in retrospect, but what doesn’t?

Best part is that this game was only $30 so I still have $33 of Steam cash to spend.

I’m in no hurry. I don’t usually have more than one or two games on the go at a time, and between this new game and tinkering with Sims 4, I will keep busy.

And that’s what I have instead of a life. The End.

More after the break!

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Played DOS2 some more. Still greatly enjoying it. Happy that after I got washed ashore, the open world aspect kicked in and I am now free to roam.

And the open world is full of quests, missions, plot points, and miscellaneous other points of interest, and that’s exactly what I want in a game.

I have to admit, though, that the graphically dense world is taking some getting used to. There’s just so much to see everywhere that it’s easy to sort of lose track of yourself and then you have to find your character on the screen again.

I am sure I will adapt, however.

More annoying is that there seems to be some kind of disconnect between where I think the mouse pointer should be in order to interact with something and where the game thinks it should be.

I haven’t quite sussed out the nature of the error yet. I think it has something to do with me expected to be able to click the edge of the object in question and the game wanting me to click somewhere closer to the center, but I could be wrong.

Luckily, when you hold down the left ALT button, it highlights all the interactable objects on the screen, so I can find things that way.

Getting a bit tired of everyone having some version of a British accent in these games. I mean, it’s a fantasy world, and the British don’t own fantasy. You could have everyone speak in sexy Southern Gentleman slow drawls and it would be just as “accurate”.

But again, that’s still just a little quibble. You can infer that if I am complaining about such small details, the game must be pretty damned good.

And it is.

One interesting note is that the minute I entered Fort Joy proper I gained two followers – one is a glassy-eyes black cat who seems confused about why it is following me, leading me to conclude that someone is using that cat to spy on me, and a tiny rodent that seems to be rising another, slightly larger rodent.

This, of course, reminded me of one of my favorite supporting characters of all time. the Narnia Chronicles’ stalwart and noble Reepicheep.

C. S. Lewis really hit it out of the part with Reepicheep. A tiny (well, mouse-sized) mouse with a heart full of courage, bravado, gallantry and compassion, he’s like a tiny mouse Musketeer in many ways.

If only there was a word for that.

Reepicheep was my all time favorite character in Narnia (besides Aslan, obviously) when my mother read the books to me when I was little.

That combination of tiny stature and huge courageous heart makes me love him to pieces to this very day.

So far, the one in DOS2 hasn’t spoken yet.

It better have a clipped Brigadier type accent when it does.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.