Not feeling very good at the moment. Hence the gruesome image.

Got that “I hate doing things” kind of depression going on. All I really want to do is crawl into bed and sleep till the world stops hurting.

Nothing appeals to me. Everything seems like way more pain and work than it is worth. My head hurts, my joints ache, and my nose not only runs but runs directly from my right nostril into the sides of my mouth if I am not vigilant.

So yeah., Woke up with a mouthful of snot, basically. That’s a pretty bad way to start one’s day by anyone’s measure.

Not as bad as my nightmares about waking up buried alive or in the hospital full of tubes and unable to move, but still pretty bad.

Claustrophobia is a harsh mistress.

At least I know not to take my current negative brain state too seriously. I mean, yeah it sucks, but it’s not important.

No doubt I will feel differently not too long from now.

Hell, maybe I am just in need of a few more hours of sleep.

Sir Wayfarer must have seen the trepidation in my eyes.

“Remember your training, lad. ” he said. “Nothing you see here is real. It’s all just tricks meant to test your courage and resolve. Have faith in Christ and keep going. ”

I nodded, gulped, and said a quick prayer to Saint Christopher, and resolved to ignore the dozens of corpses hanging from the trees in this accursed forest.

“A trick. ” I told myself firmly as we passed tree after tree festooned with the most gruesome parodies of gaiety imaginable. “The forest wants to trick me into running away, and I am not going to let it. ”

Memories of all the times I was chastised for my stubbornness as a child flitted through my mind, and made me smile.

As my uncle Ivan used to say, one man’s stubbornness is another’s steely resolve.

Thus buoyed, the Forest of Death’s tricks lost all power to frighten me. This seemed to enrage it. The hanging corpses became quite amusing in their exaggerated gruesomeness. Then they began to look like people I knew were alive back home.

When they started saying vile things culled from my deepest fears and worries, I laughed right in their stupid faces.

Sir Wayfarer grinned. “What are you seeing, lad?”.

“My cousin Gregor. ” I confessed. “He just told me I am failing to live up to the family name and that I am a not even fit to be a Squire, let alone a Knight. ”

“Typical. ” said Sir Wayfarer. “You know what I am seeing? Cows. Bloated, bleeding, pitifully mooing cows. ”

“You should tell them ghosts are supposed to say ‘boo’, not ‘moo’!” I japed.

And thus we passed the fearsome Forest of Death, laughing all the way,

Well that turned out more positive than I would have thought.

Told you my feelings would change! I still feel tired and kind of crappy, but I am more relaxed about it now.

Time to go get those couple more hours of sleep.

Who knows, I might even feel better after them.

Crazier things have been known to happen.

---

Halfway to Home

Well I just found out that my father is dead.

Found out in a really halfassed and indirect way, of course. Typical. I found out when my sister Catherine messaged me to ask if I wanted any of his stuff and mentioned that Anne was flying in and Kim (my half-sister) was already there.

So I messaged back “Is he dead??”.

And yup, he is. Turns out she thought my brother David had told me already. He said he had. My guess is that said message got lost in the bowels of Facebook somewhere.

That shit seems to happen a lot lately. Facebook messaging has become bizarrely unreliable. Messages show up days late, or get lost entirely.

Turns out, that shit can have some pretty harsh consequences.

But whatever. I know now, that is what is important. Catherine says they don’t know when they are having the funeral. Maybe not till the spring.

He wanted to be buried in the little graveyard in Ontario where his parents are buried. Fair enough. Sounds reasonable to me.

Of course, there’s no way for me to get there without financial assistance of some sort. Ontario is a long way from here. More than half a continent away.

But I suppose I will make it somehow.

I certainly don’t want to miss it. That would be horrible, too horrible to even contemplate. It would make all the other times I have been depressed because those close to me were doing something without me pale in comparison.

Got a whole lot of emotions with nowhere to go now. Makes me wish I had gotten my shit together enough to write him a letter when he was still around.

I expect that I will write a final letter to him in this space some time soon. To say that this is going to take me a while to process is rather an understatement.

Makes me want to see my mother ASAP more than ever before. Maybe she will be at the funeral. Another reason to want to go.

For God’s sake, don’t leave without me, Mom. Don’t leave me behind. Let me hug and hold you one more time. Let me listen to you tell me things. Let me talk to you about my life and my problems. Let me in before you go.

I miss my family so much. Especially my mother. But all of them.

I’ve spent a lot of time hating my father. I still don’t know how I ended up all alone in a shower stall at The Spa when I was only four years old. That’s how I got raped.

And I still blame him for my being removed from university just when I was starting to come out of my shell. That hurt me so badly that I still haven’t recovered from it 25 years later. I was not ready for the real world.

I’m still not ready for the real world.

Some chicks never learn how to fly.

They fall to the ground and stay there.

And some of those chicks don’t even have the good sense to die.

Instead, they struggle along, and dream of home.

I think I will lay back down now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s a revelation I had this morning, right before I went to bed. Seemed like a big deal at the time but now… I’m not feeling it.

Pretty self-explanatory, at least if you know me. Been (far too) keenly aware of having a lot of this mythical attribute “potential” due to my intellect and so on.

As you may have picked up, this did not fill me with joy. For various reasons, it always seemed more like a burden or a curse to me. Meant expectations were higher for me and I have some serious , and largely specious, issues with expectations.

Maybe that’s the problem. Nobody ever actually had high expectations of me, or if they did, they never told me what those were. So I had to imagine them. And as we all know, the monsters we create for ourselves are always far worse than the real ones.

Anyhow, what occurred to me this morning was that this big potential of mine vastly multiplied the number of possible courses my life could take. My gifts could be applied in so many different ways that it’s no wonder I have had an acute case of option paralysis about the whole issue for as long as I can remember.

Even as a kid, the whole “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question scared me in ways I didn’t understand at the time. I was so averse to even thinking about the subject that I went to UPEI without the slightest idea of what I wanted to do with my life besides “I aced Accounting so…. business maybe?”.

Oh, and “I like computers so…. programming?”.

Neither of those worked out. I never even glanced at the business courses when I was thrown into the unexpected chaos of registration day, and programmed turned out to be something I could do but definitely something I could not enjoy.

I might do better now, being forewarned. If I decided to try to get into programming now, I would know that this was something I would have to actually struggle to understand, as opposed to all of the subjects in which I excelled on natural talent alone.

The end goal would be to be able to make my own fun little apps that either entertain or make life easier for people in some way, and sell them for a buck a pop online.

Meanwhile, back at the topic….

My point is, my abilities are so profound that they can be applied to a staggeringly large number of things, and so they do not naturally lead to one thing or another.

The myth I was raised on was that as you went through the education, you would find out what you liked and what you were good at, and then you would go to college, get a degree in that, and do that for a living.

Naive, I suppose. But that’s what I was told growing up. Nothing prepared me for the possibility of being able to do so many different things.

And following my interests doesn’t help much as I have so many of them.

I went full tilt for my dream of being a TV writer. And I still could be, on paper. But the fundamental issues with the machinery of my mind plus a lot of people deciding, at the last minute, I was not worth their help at VFS, killed that dream.

Maybe I should look at becoming a therapist of some sort instead.

But not right now.

Right now, I need a nap.

---

The Queen of Air and Darkness

That’s the name of a Poul Anderson story I read today, and it had a strange but ultimately beneficial effect on me.

The basic story is that there are humans living on an alien planet and there’s also aliens on that planet called Outlings that the humans mostly think are mythical.

But they aren’t. And one of them snatches a human child to be raised as a changeling. For you see, for highly bullshitty reasons, these aliens are taking forms drawn from European mythos like wraiths, nicors, and even a faerie Queen.

Hence the title.

And this story got me thinking about that vast uncharted area outside my conscious, rational mind where I normally fear to tread. That’s the place where these mythical creatures come from, after all, and so projecting my mind into that realm as part of reading the story was a way to accidentally end up going there.

In particular, there was a passage where the aliens are mind-magicking the mother of the missing child and convincing her to leave the harsh realm of science and other “grey stories” about the world and come join them.

And I think that must have tapped into something in me, because after I finished the story, put the book down, and was falling asleep, I felt this wonderfully warm feeling deep inside me, and realized what a harsh and hostile and cold world my rational mind had made for me, and how badly I wanted to stay in this warm feeling and not go back to that harsh cold world ever again.

And now that I am awake, I find myself wondering whether my view of the world as being a cold cruel place is accurate or if it’s just what happens when you build your worldview from such an icy and unforgiving and merciless substance as logic.

Maybe human beings just aren’t meant to live on logic alone, and when we try, we end up cutting ourselves off from humanity and human warmth and the vital life-sustaining heartblood that keeps us sane and healthy.

Maybe my depression and my merciless and unsentimental pursuit of “the truth” are intimately interconnected and in order to become healthy, I am going to have to learn to accept the irrational, the unknowable, and the merely human into my mind.

Maybe what I really need is to abandon my Olympian POV and climb down into the valley where it’s warm and friendly and human and whether or not something is really, really “true” or not gives way to more human concerns.

Maybe everything, even objectivity, turns toxic when overapplied.

Maybe I need to rescue myself from the truth,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here I go. Time to list my assets in order to remind myself that I have some. And further, that they are, in fact, quite substantial.

I know this might seem like pure masturbation of the ego, but it it serves a higher purpose : to fight the voices in my head that tell me I am a horrible toxic waste of a human being who is a massive liability to all of humanity in general and to those unfortunate enough to know me in particular.

So consider this the opposite of, um…. that.

This time I want to very specifically re-imagine all my gifts as assets – like they are money in the bank just waiting for me to spend it.

I think this will actualize them for me in ways other metaphors cannot.

Might as well start off with that big old brain of mine. Ever since I learned to read before I turned three years old, I have known that I was gifted. And way back then, I sure as heck liked all the attention it got me.

And yes, nobody ever treated my gifted mind like an asset once I got to school, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t one. Neither does the fact that I do not currently have a way of using it to make me some money.

It is a massive and substantial asset nonetheless. When it comes to selling one’s talents in the open marketplace, my intellect alone makes me worth a lot of money. In the right position, I could be one hell of an employee. Not only would I be good at my job, I would gladly help those above me advance their careers in return for various little perks and privileges and, of course, lots of cash.

And it’s not just raw brain power. It also comes with a high degree of creativity and problem solving acumen. I see solutions where others only see problems. Issues that completely flummox most people I can solve within seconds. In many ways, this makes me downright magical.

And that includes human problems as well. I have a keen understanding of what makes people tick and often understand people better than they understand themselves. This lets me put together solutions in which the human factors are front and center.

That alone puts me ahead of a lot of supposed gurus out there.

Plus I have a certain instinct for strategy. Not in the chess playing sense. More like a ruthless application of those creative problem solving skills. I could totally help my chosen mentor outmaneuver the other corporate sharks to advance their career.

And of course, as they rise, so would I.

And the best part is that I don’t give a shit about status, careers, who’s on top, or any of that corporate bullshit. To me, a successful career is one that gives me the lifestyle I want. Good pay and good perks are enough for me. I would be perfectly happy to play second fiddle to my patron’s ambitions.

I don’t need power, rank, a key to the executive bathroom, a corner office, or a gold plated limo. Just plenty of cash and comfort and pleasure.

I would even be willing to be my patron’s secret weapon. Someone nobody knows about but them, just a shadowy figure they bring problems to on the down-low.

In fact, I would find that highly amusing.

So yeah. I could be a massive asset to the right person.

But where the heck would I find them?

More after the break.

---

Weird how a list of my assets turned into this weird corporate fantasy, isn’t it?

More than half of that is stuff that has been bubbling on the slow back burner of my id for a long time now. A dream of how I could make myself useful in the world in a way that would make me happy and that seems roughly plausible.

Of course, I would have to meet this patron somehow, and convince them to take a chance on me. Neither of those are easy tasks.

Especially that first one. Meeting them. Rather hard to do when one is paralyzed by social anxiety as I am.

I wonder if there is some weird little corner of the internet where I could post a rather specific kind of personal ad or “job wanted” posting.

Available for hire, one extraordinary genius. Sees solutions where others only see problems, solves tricky issues with miraculous ease, plans next-level strategic moves as a matter of course, and understands people better than they understand themselves. All available to you right now for the low, low price of a luxurious lifestyle and, of course, gobs and gobs for cash. Has no use for status, power, or “success”. Perfectly willing to let you take all the credits for all his brilliant ideas. Astound your friends. Out-think your rivals. Rise like a rocket in the hierarchy of your choice. And all you have to do is give him a luxurious, elite lifestyle and, and I cannot stress this enough, loads of cash. Let me be your genie and I will make all your wishes come true! Contact….

And so forth and so on

It’s a nice little fantasy, anyhow. And it makes me feel like I have something to contribute, which was the whole idea of this exercise anyhow.

Does so better than just another listing of my gifts, to be honest. I know the list fairly well by now and that helps a lot but it doesn’t solve the problem of fighting back against my irrationally abysmal self worth and the bad tapes in my head that support it.

I need new tapes. Ones that remind me that despite what the negative pressure in my head tries to tell me, I am and always have been an amazingly gifted, talented person who has a hell of a lot to contribute to the world.

All I really need is some way for me and the world to get together on this and make it happen for both our sake.

And I would love to say I am working on it.

But am I, really?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s a chilling thought : what if this really is the best that I can do?

This sad little crummy life of mine? What if, despite my vast gifts, I am currently actually doing the best I can and this, for me, is as good as it gets?

Nope. I can’t accept that. Every fiber of my being rejects that idea wholesale. It might be true, for all I know, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept it.

And patient readers know how unusual it is for me to say something like that. For the most part, I am an extremely realistic person. Probably moreso than is healthy.

But this is one idea I will resist with all my strength until they put me in my grave.

Because if I truly thought this was as good as it gets for me, I would kill myself. I need the possibility of improvement in order to function at all. No matter how distant, I need the dream of being a whole and functional adult some day in order to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

It could be argued that if I accepted that I am currently doing the best I can, I would then be able to fully forgive myself for not doing better and that would be an enormous gain in terms of self worth and sanity.

But I can’t do it. The closest I can get to that is to tell myself that this is the best I feel like doing right now.

But of course, that’s not true. I want to do far, far, far better. I want to have a job and a life and money and my own place and a boyfriend and so many other things that healthy people take for granted.

And yet, what do I do in pursuit of those goals? Precious little. Blogging and therapy. That’s about it.

And those help. But they are so very very slow. Drip drip drip, like mineral-bearing water dripping from a cave ceiling to the cave floor below forming a stalagmite over eons.

And I want to live now, god damn it.

I want to throw off this decades long malaise and rise to the heavens and shine like a great big beautiful star for all to see. I want to break these chains and throw off my shackles and unleash my miracles and wonders and fantastic spells so they can amaze, astound, and entertain the masses, and maybe even leave them a little better off in the process.

I want to help, dammit. I want it more than I want anything else in the world. I could contribute so much to the world with my wizardly powers. I see so much that is hidden and obscured to most people and that means I can solve problems that others can’t even begin to comprehend.

There’s so many places I need to be. So many things I need to do,

So this can’t be the best I can do. It just can’t.

Somehow, I will get to a place where I can do better.

I have to. It’s growth, or death. There is no stasis.

More after the break.

---

Waddy fug, man

Ordering in has become increasingly stressful and unpredictable.

So I tried to order a burger from Boston Pizza through good ol’ Skip the Dishes. Burger, fries, starter salad, $30.

It tells me “Order Rejected”. Rejected! WTF?

So I hit the button to chat with support. Support tells me my order was rejected due to an undelivered cash order.

By which they mean that order I tried to do from Opa! the Greek place last week, I assume. Which never made it to me through no fault of my own.

I waited. The phone never rang. Not my fault. Might have been due to some work on the phone lines in my area. Still not my fault.

Here’s the email I am sending to Support for Skip the Dishes :

Apparently I can’t place cash orders with you any more because of something which was out of my control.

I made an order through your service for food from Opa!.

My phone never rang. I saw the driver on the order tracker but my phone did not ring.

They were working on the phone lines in my area at the time. Perhaps that is why the driver could not get through.

But i was waiting for my food, ready and eager (I hadn’t had Greek in a long time) and…. nothing.

Now I have done hundreds of orders through your fine service, paid cash more times than not, and there have never been a problem before now.

It seems unfair to me that I should now lose my cash order privileges over one incident which was in no way my fault.

I do most of my daily business in cash. So losing cash order privileges with your service would most likely mean I go elsewhere.

I really hope we can clear up this misunderstanding.

Needless to say, I am pretty pissed off with Skip the Dishes right now. Apparently the hundreds of orders that have been completed successfully mean nothing to them.

This is what happens when you have a system that punishes blindly.

---

Well I ordered pasta directly from Pizza Hut. At least they still trust me.

Got the Family Size Meaty Marina Rotini. Funny how rotini and penne have become the default pastas in restaurants these days.

When I was a kid, all we knew was spaghetti and macaroni. When my mom got rotini one time, I thought it looked like alien intestines.

I love that at Pizza Hut, I can get the Family Size pasta meal and get two identical meals for a lot less than double the price of one.

That’s what family sized used to mean. It meant the same as “economy sized” or “jumbo sized” or “bulk packaged”.

It meant you were saving money by buying in bulk.

Nowadays, the bulk price is often the exact same as the regular price, just bigger.

You know, I think tonight has me feeling rather conservative.

Everything sucks now compared to the way it used to be! Society is going to Helena Handbasket and it’s all because of young people changing things that were perfectly fine the way they were! And they change things for no reason at all!

I mean, what are they even thinking, making things worse for no reason?

Kids these days. I tell ya. What’s this world coming to?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got back from therapy.

Yes, on a Friday, but it’s back to Thursdays next week.

And it was a pretty damned good session. Really got my emotions flowing freely, which is my clear (ish) and defined (ish) goal in therapy now.

Of course, I only really got things going near the end of the session. That is, sadly, par for the course for me. Perhaps, on some subliminal level, I need the threat of this pathway for expression of my innermost feelings closing soon in order to break out of my usual ennui and actually frogging express myself for once.

And not the usual half-fake way of expressing myself either. The real deal.

That’s one of the things that came up today. We were examining why I got so damned mad when talking with Ross last week and that lead to my talking about how I don’t usually open up to people – not really – because when I have tried in the past, people have been overwhelmed by it and acted more to protect themselves than to help me.

Which is fair enough, I suppose. I have a powerful effect on people and they have to keep themselves safe first before they can help me.

But it’s still very frustrating. I can’t really confide in anybody. Even my therapist can only handle a partial dose of me.

We also talked about hyperlexia, which I don’t think I have mentioned here before. I stumbled across it recently and it kind of spoke to me.

Basically, it’s a developmental issue that is marked by a precocious ability to read.

Hello! I could read before I was three. When I entered elementary school, I could already read at a grade four level and do math up to but not including long division.

With some children, this presents alongside a form of autism spectrum disorder. And while I do not consider myself autistic or even Aspergers’s, I also think I am on that general spectrum somewhere.

What I find REALLY interesting is that according to that Wiki article, one study suggests that hyperlexia sometimes presents alongside a visual spatial learning disorder.

Hello! I have definitely had one of those for my whole life too. There has always been this weird disconnection between my eyes and my hands and between my brain and the spatial, absolute world.

Anyhow, I explained this to my therapist and talked about how I could read at such an absurdly early age and what that said about me.

And near the end, I started really venting about how my amazing talents never countered my feeling of not even deserving to exist because nobody in my life had ever treated them like they were worth anything.

Instead, they treated them as a problem for them personally, because they made me harder to teach and made me unable to fit in with the other students as well.

So to this day, it’s hard for me to value my objectively quite astounding mental abilities. My intelligence, my creativity, my wit, my charm…. big fucking deal.

I mean, sure, I’m a wizard, but I am the saddest. loneliest wizard around.

If only I could make my loneliness and depression disappear.

More after the break.

---

A sudden chill

What the hell, man.

I was laying in bed, very mellowed out, lights out, listening to music, maybe a qurter asleep at most, when sudden I got this horrible chill.

This happened once before. And like that other time, it only happened once, thank God.

Because if that shit happened over and over, I am pretty sure it would shatter my sanity.

And the worst part is that I was in such a good mood before now. I was content, relaxing, recharging my mental batteries, at peace with the world and then wham.

I feel my blood run cold throughout my entire body. Instantly.

That’s so goddamned unfair.

And now I am all freaked out and paranoid and feel sick from the anxiety attack I am having, and I’m not sure if I want to go out with my friends to Subway like I was going to do around 20 minutes or so from now, because I feel so fucking fragile right now.

I mean, what the effing bejesus just happened?

Did I just have a stroke or a heart attack or something? Did I have some kind of spasm? Was by body so unaccustomed to my being in a good mood that it freaked out in protest of the bizarre, alien condition?

I find myself fumbling around trying to find my sanity. I swear, I just had it… look around, it can’t have gone far. Careful not to step on it though, it’s awfully small….

I don’t think I will be going out tonight. Which means I need to get up from my desk and tell Joe this like…. right now.

I will be right back.

---

Well, that’s it. The boom has been lowered. The die has been cast. The Gordian knot has been cut. The pink choo choo has pulled out of Flower Time Station and is now puking by the side of the road.

It’s not a pretty sight.

I imagine that I will eventually order in. I just signed up for Foodora Canada and I am eager to try them out.

I checked them out because I saw the name on the door to the local 7-11, saying they delivered for 7-11 now.

And I was happy to see it because I had just been thinking that my determination to not give Uber Eats any money because of how they treated my pal Led was slipping and they were doing the delivering for 7-11 before now.

So when I saw the new sticker on the door I was like, score!

So then I check out the website and holy cheese and crackers, they have places that deliver for only 99 cents with NO MINIMUM.

Presumably, on Foodora, restaurants have figured out that lowering the onramp for ordering is a GOOD thing, and I bet some of them are even paying the delivery people themselves in order to attract new business.

So once i feel a little more human, I will order through them.

I hope they take cash ’cause I only have $8 in my account right now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the comedy thang yesterday and last night.

New bartender. Had a strange and funny moment with him. I am just sitting there while Felicity goes to our bathroom and this seeming random stranger gets up from the bar and walks up to me and asks, in a soft friendly voice, if I want a diet cola or something.

And at this point, my head is spinning because I don’t not waddy fug is going on, so after a few pregnant seconds I say “Do you….. work here?”

And that’s when he tells me he’s the bartender. And I was relieved because now the world made sense to me again.

And a little disappointed, ’cause his gentle voice was quite attractive to me and had he been a random dude who wanted to buy me a drink, I would not have said no.

Might have turned into one heck of an evening. I’m just sayin’.

Wrote my jokes in the afternoon, as usual. But this time I kind of cheated. A joke from when I used to do Hank Watches Television, my rather crude but effective webcomic, occurred to me, and then I suddenly realized that I still had every HWT I ever did, and from there it was easy to go to the files and essentially plagiarize myself.

Way back then in 2009, I found the site stripcreator.com, checked it out, and realized that it made making webcomics so easy that even I could do it. And so for a while, I did one every weekday.

Of course, just like this blog, I never showed the comics to anyone except a few friends, so nothing ever came of it.

But it was a way to showcase my comedy talents and I am glad I did it. Sometimes I get the urge to go back to it, or to start up another strip.

Or maybe to use the existing crudely put together strips to attract someone who is willing to draw the thing in collaboration with me.

Anyhow, I did like 300 of the things, so I will be stealing from myself for many Wednesdays to come. And I don’t feel bad about it, because all the greats do it.

And it’s not like my standup audience (hi, Jason!) will know the difference.

Oh, and speaking of which, last night was special because for once, everyone int he bar was actually listening to us.

I didn’t mention it at the time because I didn’t want to jinx it. But it wasn’t just Jason last night. Everyone in the bar paid attention to our little comedy show.

I hope that’s a sign of things to come. I will learn a lot more, faster, with more people listening to my little jokes.

In particular, I want to work on my audience rapport. I have been sort of semi-ignoring the audience so far in favour of just kind of doing my thing, but I know that I have the potential to be able to really connect with the audience and that’s where I want to take this little dog and pony show next.

Just me and the audience, hanging out and shooting the breeze, enjoying life.

Sounds good to me!

More after the break.

---

Flow Morphia Slow

Obligatory music link :

No seriously, Morphia…. slow the fuck down.

I am currently somewhere near the maximum level of being fucked up by bad sleep. Not only am I groggy, disoriented, sweaty, dizzy, and feeling faint, but when I got up from the computer to go get supper, I felt this bizarre sensation like something big was evaporating from the core of my body.

That was pretty fucking weird.

Oh, and I also feel weak and tired and sort of sleepy as well. And as always, there’s that feeling of having been through some kind of extraordinary ordeal that I only just barely survived and next time I may not.

Like I just ran a marathon through Hell.

I feel like this is what it is like after having had some kind of powerful religious vision. The mind has been running at maximum capacity, way beyond anything that could happen while your conscious mind is active, and that means you have blown through a massive amount of your physical brain resources and that frigging hurts.

Like writing an exam, but oh so much worse.

Oh, I almost forgot our old friend, the feeling of having been squashed flat and had all the juices squeezed out of you like bacon squashed by a spatula on a griddle.

I wish there was some way I could see one of these extra intense naps coming. Then I could prepare myself. Make sure I am well hydrated, put a nice cool towel near the bed, or maybe a cool damp cloth. Plus a change of clothes and bedding so I can take a quick shower to rinse the flop-sweat off my body then change into clean clothes before maybe getting back into a nice clean bed to get more sleep.

Hopefully of a more healthy variety.

Oh, and something light and nutritious and easy to eat should be on hand so I can replace the calories and nutrients I just blew through.

I’m thinking some sort of dried fruit snack, perhaps. And a croissant.

And obviously, a nice cold beverage. Chilled fruit juice would be ideal, but not too much of it, as it tends to hit the blood sugar pretty hard.

So does dried fruit, come to think of it. Dammit, there’s always a catch.

So I guess what I am saying is that if I was rich and had other people to do all the work, I would have this kind of thing set up by my bed all the time, just in case.

Then again, if I was rich, I would have a personal trainer and a kickass home gym and I would lose the extra weight that led to the sleep apnea in the first place.

But I think I would still have all that nice stuff set up around my bed.

After all, waking up to a croissant and fresh fruit is great no matter what!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Kind of like this :

But, ya know. Different.

I have once more circled back to the idea of simply letting my ego expand out of control and see how far that takes me.

I mean, objectively speaking, I am extremely intelligent. To the point of being smarter than most people. I can think rings around the general populace, I’ve been a high academic achiever for my whole life without ever trying hard, and my first drafts are better than most people’s final drafts.

Plus I’m hilarious. Or so I have been told.

So there’s certainly a lot to base a huge ego on. I’ve resisted developing one for a long time for various reasons, including :

1. early childhood admonitions from siblings against getting a “swelled head”, whatever that means. Don’t make us jealous of you, I guess
2. the feeling that once my ego started to expand, it would just keep going until I was a raving loonie with delusions of grandeur in a rubber room somewhere. Probably wouldn’t actually happen but still, the idea scares me.
3. Not wanting to lose my slender connection with the rest of humanity (what I call my egalitarianism) by letting my ego and my mind take me way up into the stratosphere where I can’t even relate to other geniuses any more and become alien to my own species
4. not wanting to turn into the raging arsehole I have always known I could be if I let my ego run wild. I’m talking about a smug, self-satisfied, mocking kind of prick who uses his mental superiority to manipulate people and circumstance to his own advantage and who ruthlessly uses his IQ advantage to take what he wants and to hell with the consequences to anyone but himself because fuck all these idiots, I can cheat them blind with one neural ganglion tied behind my back, so why not take advantage of that to get everything I want?

It’s that last one that haunts me because I am definitely tempted.

I mean, with my amazing mind I can skate around most people like they are standing still. It would be absurdly easy for me to manipulate those stunted statues into giving me their money and thanking me for it.

So why should I be stuck in this pathetic little life when I have godlike mental powers that could let me write my own ticket if I could just stop being so lame?

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all I do is eat junk food, play video games, and hang out with my friends. I could be living the good life, with a house of my own, a car and driver, a sweet job in the creative field, and loads of disposable income I can use to indulge every little whim I am ever had,

Surely I am entitled to some level of reward for all the amazing things I can do.

And if it takes going on a huge ego trip where I dare the universe to try to take me down a peg – many have tried, all have died (metaphorically speaking) – in order to get me out of this depressive slump, wouldn’t it be worth it?

Even if it makes me a bit of an asshole at first?

More after the break.

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A warehoused life

Obligatory music link :

It struck me recently that basically, I have been in storage for my entire adult life.

Self-storage, of course. Heaven forbid someone else had to invest literally any effort and care into my housing and feeding. No, I tucked myself in a nice little out of the way spot where nobody would have to notice or even think about me ever all by myself.

After all, it’s how I was raised. Try not to exist. Don’t remind people you’re around. Blend in with the furniture. Disappear into the woodwork. Children should be neither seen heard nor even remembered. Work as hard as you can to make us forget your existence entirely. Do you best to not have happened at all.

And I struggle with all that bad programming to this day. I tell myself that I am a real person whose needs and desires are as important as anyone else’s and that I deserve to be here using resources and occupying space.

And sometimes I even believe it.

For a minute or two. Then the old stuff bleeds through.

And then I am back to feeling like I don’t even deserve to be alive again. That my entire existence has been one long mistake, from today all the way back to when I was that one extra tricky sperm that evaded my mother’s tubal ligation and forced me into existence even though nobody wanted me there.

Well it’s not ;like I got any say in it either. If I had known how I would end up, maybe I would have decided to skip it altogether.

For my entire life, I have never fit in anywhere. Least of all my home. I might have felt safe (ish) in my home at 135 Belmont Street, but I never felt welcome. I always felt like nobody knew what to do with me and certainly nobody wanted to take responsibility for me care and upkeep so I was simply ignored.

Worse than that. I was made to feel unwelcome. Like everyone resented my even being alive and wished I had never been born and were certainly never going to give up on quarter inch of their own territory in order to make a share for me.

And here I am today, unable to see to my own needs because I deep down don’t think I am worth the effort, still staying out of the way and doing my best to disappear forever.

I mean, when you feel like you are imposing just by existing, what else can you do?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Some days, mere survival is all I can do.

Today feels like one of those days. I am very tired and sleepy and I get the strong feeling that I will spend most of today asleep. I have already had ten hours of sleep and I am betting that I will end up getting still more, given how I feel.

And I am trying to learn to just accept things like this. But it’s all so random. I need predictability in my life and that makes it damned near impossible for me to accept that there is no way of knowing what sort of day I have in front of me based on how the universe happens to feel to me at any given moment.

So I end up clinging to whatever external stability I can grab in order to compensate for the chaos and turmoil inside.

And when I try to pull myself together and get all my ducks in a row, I fall apart instead. The center does not hold. That swollen sea of pain, fear, weakness, and paralysis wells up inside me and whatever pattern of stability I am trying to create dissolves before it can even be born.

It’s like trying to build a sand castle in the middle of a hurricane. That hates me.

There has to be some way to soothe the savage seas within. I long for peace – and not just in the form of shelter from the storm, which is all I have now. Just a tiny little shelter where I can hide from the raging tempest above and try to keep myself amused.

My god, even in my metaphors I’m agoraphobic.

Well, as above, so below, I guess.

And I want so badly to be able to escape my flimsy little shelter which never seems to be big enough to keep all of me safe at the same time. There always seems to be some part of me sticking out into the chaos, and the only way to deal with that is to remain as still and small as possible in order to keep the maximum amount of me inside.

And that’s a pretty shitty way to live.

The important thing I have to remember, though, is that it’s my life that sucks – not me. My life is deeply unsatisfying to me right now and for decades I have internalized that via self-loathing and tearing myself apart.

And all to keep myself from having to, like, DO things. Because that’s where discontent inevitably leads, right?

Well no more. I am unhappy with my life and I am not going to forget that. I amj ust going to have to learn to live with it.

Maybe it will lead to my overcoming my internal issues and finally making a big push to find some kind of paid word to do.

And maybe it won’t. Maybe it will just leave me howling my pain into the night.

But it sure as fuck beats suffering in silence.

More after the break.

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Pressing My Luck

All right, big money, no Whammies!

I don’t normally press my luck. Except when it gets all wrinkly.

Anyhow, here I am, oressing my luck by not doing Part 2 of my blogging until 7 pm when I know I have to be in the shower by 7:30 pm in order to be ready to leave at 7:45 pm to go do Subway with Le Gang.

A little under 500 words in half an hour? No problem.

I am in a fairly good mood. Anxiety lurks around every corner, as usual, and that takes away from my sense of calm, but I at least feel somewhat content and I am enjoying being alive for now.

Things seem nice and I feel like I have things to look forward to, and that’s good. That’s a solid peg above mere survival, so I’ve seen some improvement on that front.

I did sleep most of the afternoon away, but whatever, it’s not like I lost precious productivity to it.

You have to have it to lose it. All that happened was I didn’t play video games as much as I usually do.

Boo frigging hoo.

And yet, it sort of does feel like I lost something akin to productivity. That leads to the saddening conclusion that playing video games is my substitute for productivity because of the false sense of progress and achievement they bring.

What do you mean, I did nothing all day? I will have you know that I defeated many Magisters, monsters, and assassins today and went up several levels!

Furthermore, I am closer to Divinity now. So put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Sad, isn’t it? Kind of like a hamster feeling like he’s making progress towards a goal because of all the miles he puts on his FitBit running on his wheel.

I’ve always assumed that if I got something going in my life – like when I was getting work from UpWork – then I would just naturally play video games less.

And that was true. But the hidden clause in that statement was that I had to leave the warm safe world of my video games in order to get something going in the first place, and I have been avoiding doing that by obsessively playing video games instead.

Video games are safe and easy and low stress compared to trying to find people to pay me money to do a thing. The variables are all well known, there is nobody around to trigger my social anxiety, and like I keep saying, while I play them, I am okay.

Not overjoyed, but not anxious, frustrated, or depressed either. Ergo : okay.

They offer me very high density escapism. Loads and loads of mental stimulation for a downright trivial input of energy on my part. More than enough to fill my mind and displace all my worry, anxiety, depression, etc while I am playing.

What happens if I stop playing them?

Let’s hope I never have to find out. Not, at least, until I am strong enough to willingly set them aside in order to make room for life to happen.

And I am getting there.

But I am not there yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

What shall I talk about… my rage, or video games?

Maybe a little of both.

On the video game front, I did end up returning Dragon’s Dogma. It was really the only way to resolve the conflict. Maybe in doing so I denied myself the experience of a truly amazing game with the best combat system ever, but whatever.

I am content to remain blissfully ignorant of the potential loss in favour of finally moving forward and getting something new.

That something is a game that for many years I only knew as the punchline to jokes about games that took a really powerful PC to run : Crysis.

I’ve only just purchased and downloaded it, so I dunno whether I like it or not, but it sounds pretty interesting and seems like it will make a good contrast to all the Divinity : Original Sin 2 I am still playing because it’s a first person shooter and DOS2 is an isometric RPG with turn based combat.

And to be honest, as much as I am still enjoying the heck out of DOS2, I have also been craving something more action oriented and exciting and realtime, as well as something 3D and hence more “real” feeling.

Crysis seems to fit those specs to a T, and with a 91 percent rating on Metacritic, it comes highly recommended. So I figure I will give it a shot.

And if it turns out I don’t like it, I’ll return it. Steam’s easy return policy is really my best friend in matters such as these, and theirs too because I am far more likely to buy a game if I know I can return it if I don’t like it, and from their point of view it doesn’t matter which game they sell me as long as they get to keep my money.

It’s not like me switching games costs them anything.

As for the rage, it continues to burn hot and bright, like a stellar fragment lost in a dark and twisted nebula.

Remember folks, this is your one stop shop for the nerdiest metaphors on the internet.

All the venting I have been doing lately has had some effect, though. I can feel the difference. I still have a lot to get off my chest in terms of bitterness, anger, and so on, but I can tell the pressure inside me had been reduced.

After the break, I will take another stab at pouring my darkness out onto the page, where it can be contained and warehoused like the toxic biohazard it is.

The tricky bit is integrating it into my sense of self. Venting is all well and good for reducing internal pressure and making room in my head for the mental operations needed for me to be sane, but in the long run, I will need to re-imagine myself as someone who is sometimes angry about stuff and that’s okay.

The more I look at the self-image I have been working with for all these years, the more it seems like something a child drew – colorful, but not at all realistic.

Clearly, I need to do better.

Now to go have a Crysis.

More after the break.

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After My Crysis

So far, the game is pretty good.

It’s hard. I die a lot. It’s definitely not a mindless shooter. You have to use some a[ctual tactical wisdom, just like rel commandos in the field.

And so I need to learn to think before acting and plan things ahead somewhere. That, to put it mildly, had never been my strong suit.

Well, to be more specific, planning on the fly has never been my strong suit. Given time to work things out in my head, I can be quite good at planning ahead, but in realtime I quite simply lack the instinct for it.

But I am learning. The game is hard but forgiving. You don’t have a lot of health and armor, at least at first, but it regenerates quite quickly when you are not being shot or otherwise wounded by something.

I’ve played other games with that setup. Like that Far Cry game I played on the Xbox. It keeps things moving quickly and smoothly, and makes the firefights a matter of timing and knowing when ot duck back and regenerate.

And that feel real-ish to me.

Earlier, a little voice in my head kept whining that the game was too hard and that I should return it and get something easier.

But fuck that. That’s loser thinking. I am going to persist and adapt.

Oh, and then there’s this :

That hits pretty damned close to home. I mean, not only to I have a mask like that, he has his own origin, back story, and name.

His name is Fruvous as he is cute and waggy and everyone loves him. He is cheerful and funny and affectionate and in short, he is everything I want to be.

And he is me. Only, not really. He is a version of me, perhaps. A facet of me. A carefully cultivated image of someone I wish I could be in the real world. Someone I hope to be someday once I get my shit sorted and disposed of.

But he, too, is a child’s portrait of a self. He’s a great deal of fun to pretend to be and I can’t imagine life without being him on a regular basis, but I know in many ways he is holding me back at least as much as he is helping.

In many waysm I have developed him at the expense of developing myself.

And that’s just not right. It’s not good for me. I am a victim of my own richly developed fantasy life and spend most of my time there as opposed to going out into the world and exploring myself and finding out who I really while I find (or make) a place for myself.

Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t give up my computer entirely.

But I could never be that strong.

After all, without a computer, how would I blog?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Boy, have I ever tapped into my anger.

My therapist would be so proud. Can’t wait to tell him Friday.

At present, all I have to do is think about the sort of bullshit advice I have gotten in my life and this great torrent of world-destroying rage wells up in me and all I want to do is vomit my rage into the face of everyone who ever failed me or neglected me or downright abused me when I couldn’t fight back. All while screaming “Fuck you! Fuck YOU! FUUUUCK YOUUUUUUU! ” like a demented homeless person and setting something on fire.

So…. there’s that.

It’s put me in a very punk rock state of mind. I want to scream defiance into the void and force the world to see me and to reckon with me. I want to write angry manifestos decrying all the fucking evils of the world and spraypaint unsettling mottos designed to burn people out of their comfort zones on every piece of public advertising in the world.

Banksy is a poser.

It makes me want to hijack all the communications satellites in the world and make them broadcast my disturbed thought to every TV, tablet, radio, smartphone, and Bluetooth device in the world so that the fire in my soul can be focused by my mind into a laser beam of pure hate that burns all the sickness and corruption out of this world in one glorious cleansing burst.

Give me five minutes to tell the world how there is not and never has been democracy on earth and how leadership is a myth , nobody is actually in charge, and society is an emergent property not authored by individuals, and how we are all just puffed up monkeys putting on airs, and how so much of our angst and pain comes from vast unmet spiritual needs no amount of money can solve, and then let me sit back and watch as my words set the world on fire.

My words, and the power of my contempt.

But why am I so damned angry? What am I so damned angry about?

Everything, really. All my unexpressed rage and pain. All the suffering in silence I have done because nobody takes me seriously, least of all myself. All the alienation I have endured because I was too timid to explore my world. All the harrowing hate I have suppressed because it didn’t fit the sunshiny version of myself that I projected because I thought it was the only way anyone could ever love me.

And for that matter, the only way I could love myself.

And because it let me project a fantasy world without rage or hate or pain or cruelty or insensitivity. And all I had to do was find one person I could make believe in that world and I could move in and live there too.

Well the rent is due, the garbage needs taking out, and oh, there is the small matter that not living in the real world kills you over time.

Guess I better go pay my oxygen bill.

More after the break.

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More about my anger, I am afraid.

Something that came out near the end of my talk with Ross bears mentioning. When he was starting to get apprehensive about all the anger I was expressing (as was I), I said something like “I am just trying to express how I feel without worrying about whether it is ‘right’ or not” and even at the time, I thought “Hang on to that, it seems important. “

Because the thing is, a lot of how I feel bears little to no relationship to what is true. That’s easy to explain : the emotion comes first. Then we explain it.

And so emotions are not limited by our ability to justify them. We feel how we feel whether or not we can point to something in the real world as the cause.

And so I have a lot of anger, pain, disgust, disdain, and so on that has no rationale. Maybe I can point to some real world event as the cause, but probably not. It’s probably been so long that the question is irrelevant anyway.

And some of it is simply the accumulation of the stresses and pains of ordinary life that find no outlet most of the time and so they build up.

The key point I am trying to make here is that I do not need to justify myself all the time. I think that I have been locked in a straitjacket of logic and reason and justification for far too long a time and it has blinded me to my own emotions and my own needs and led to my current unhappy state.

There is so much of me that I ignore because it doesn’t fit my false color picture of myself. And when I say ignore, I mean subtract from my conscious reality entirely.

In other words, I deny it.

I think I need to start constructing a much richer, fuller, more complete image of myself that encompasses all that I am, warts and all.

Until I create that new image, I will remain alienated from my true self and not be able to even begin to truly deal with my problems, let alone overcome them.

Growing up is like the German measles : the older you are when it happens, the worse it’s going to be. And I want to grow up. I need to grow up. I need to become a real person and not just this displaced and misplaced overgrown wunderkind who has no place in the world because he is a creature out of time.

I am capable of miracles and wonders galore but none of that matters if I remain too much of a child, afraid of the world, to do it for real.

So I need to grow up fast. Transcend the limitations of my poor self-portrait and draw a new version of myself.

Back to the drawing board!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.