Sorry for the gross image. Could have been worse.

Was on Tapestries last night and Woofle (otherwise known as Ross Archer) was online and we ended up talking and somehow that turned into him playing therapist to me, and that led to a very large amount of my Bad Stuff coming out, and that was good.

In the long run, that is. At the time, I was experiencing an unprecedented level of psychological pain. It was really quite intense, and extraordinary.

It was basically that cold feeling I get when I am dealing with my serious dirt – the feeling like I am slowly and painfully disgorging an icicle – but turned way the fuck up and lasting for quite a long time.

In fact, I am still not entirely over it, and it happened eight hours ago.

Well, better out than in, as they say. These releases of my inner darkness always leave me better off in the long run.

I have many many tons of glacial ice sitting on this heart of mine and the only way to get rid of it is to push it out via words and let it melt in the sun like an iceberg drifting south.

I made sure to tell Ross that despite the pain I was in, he had done me a hell of a lot of good just by talking with me and listening to my bitterness and despair.

I had to cut it off when I started getting cranky though. I didn’t want to end up yelling at him just because his advice did not actually apply to me.

I have heard it all before. Stay positive. Focus on what you can do. Don’t beat yourself up. Set small, achievable goals.

Hell, that last one was repeated to me on the daily every weekday for a year when I was in the Core program at Richmond Hospital and it didn’t do me a damned bit of good at that time either.

I’ve heard all the well intentioned chipper “go team go” advice out there and none of it does me the tiniest bit of good.

All of it is true and none of it matters. None of it helps. It all tracks as perfectly sane, logical, sensible, wise, and no doubt effective advice for someone other than me.

It passes all internal checks. But it’s fucking useless.

Because none of it actually changes the emotional reality within me. None of it helps with the pain and the fear and the rage and the loneliness.

It’s all just a bunch of Pollyanna bullshit that mostly just pisses me off. I don’t blame Ross and others for that – they are doing their best to help me and I appreciate that.

But these people might as well be from another dimension when it comes to interacting with my emotional issues. A dimension where emotions are optional and easy to deal with and pain is all in your mind, man.

So is everything else. Love, hate, pain, trauma, good, evil, rage, peace – they are all in your head. They don’t need to be anywhere else.

And that doesn’t give me the magic power to just wish the pain away so I can concentrate on the positive and set small achievable goals and all that shit.

You know what those small goals do for me? They remind me of how absolutely pathetic I am.

Oh, today’s achievement is that I took a shower. Yippie fucking skippy. I’ll just call up the folks at Guinness and send a telegram back home to Mom about it right away.

The truth is that I live in a sea of pain and no amount of goal setting or patting myself on the back is going to change that one fucking bit.

If there is a solution to this whole mess, it won’t be sane or small or logical or reasonable or safe or sensible or “right” or any of that weak pathetic bullshit.

It will be something big and strong and powerful and magnificent and sublime.

In other words, it will be equal to my pain.

And I won’t get there via thinking.

More after the break.

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Wow, bitter much?

It’s hard to deal with all my pain without all that rage coming out.

I can’t make actual sense out of why Ross’ advice, and similar advice, makes me so god damned angry. There is no direct logic to it.

Instead, it is about pain. The advice in question causes pain in me. Presumably, this pain comes from the deep traumae this advice is trying to address, and like any animal, I respond with anger towards the source of said pain.

Being someone who believes in self-control to an unhealthy degree and who is very meticulous about not blaming people for things they do while trying to help that don;t work, I refuse to get mad at Ross for it.

A less keenly self-aware and responsible person would not show such restraint. And who knows, maybe that’s a healthier way to live than my uber self conscious chess playing way of looking at the world, where there is no excuse for taking your anger out on others when they are not the real cause.

Just real handy.

That’s why I cut our conversation off when I realized how angry I was getting. And I am glad we got to that point : Suppressed rage is the reactor core of my depression and anything that helps bring it to the surface and vent it is good for me.

But I am not going to hurt my wonderful friend Ross in the process. That would be too high a price to pay. I don’t do that shit.

And maybe that’s foolish of me. Maybe I would be better off letting the rage come when it comes and vent on whoever it vents on at the time.

After all, that seems to be how most of humanity lives.

But not me. I know too much. I see too much. I have no capacity to pretend like what I do to others is somehow not my fault.

And if that extends my suffering, so be it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve probably done a lot of it in my life.

Almost never on purpose, of course. Usually just by being my cluelessly clever self. Answer questions too fast and too casually, causing my responses to seem flippant. Solving a complex problem that has been really bothering someone with a clarity and ease which makes them feel like idiots for not seeing the solution themselves. Showing off how bright I am without even consciously knowing I am doing it. Muscling people aside in conversations even though I am following all the rules I set in my head in order to keep me from doing that exact thing.

I guess when you are a giant amongst pygmies, or Gulliver in Lilliput, there is only so much you can do to keep people from feeling small.

Past that point, you have to just shrug and tell yourself you are doing all that you can and that’s all anyone can ask of you.

And if that still makes people feel small, that is their problem.

So I don’t exactly feel guilty for making people feel stupid just by being as bright as I am. If I truly am doing nothing to deliberately hurt them and waiting for my turn in conversations and otherwise being a good boy, then I refuse to take any blame for making people feel bad.

I mean, I would never faulty a professional athlete for making me feel slow and weak. I don’t fault math geniuses for making me feel like I do not get math. I don’t fault highly competent people for making me feel incompetent.

So why would I feel bad for making someone else feel stupid just by being bright?

I have pondered, tongue firmly in cheek, wearing a T-shirt that says “It’s not that you’re stupid, it’s that I am super smart!”.

Somehow, I doubt that would have the desired effect. In my mind, it’s clear that what I am trying to say is that my brightness should not make you feel stupid because you are only stupid by comparison to me, an exceptionally smart dude.

It’s not that you are stupid and I am normal, I imagine saying in a doomed attempt at clarification. It’s that you are normal and I am amazing.

I am sure that your level of intelligence is perfectly adequate to the tasks you perform, I would add, officially turning directly into Sheldon from Big Bang Theory.

Clearly that would not work. Still, I wish there was a way I could get the idea that I am very bright across to people in a non-threatening way.

It would make social interactions a whole lot easier for me. I would be able to give up the pretense of being normal and just be my wacky wizardly self.

Of course, society’s official advice for me would be to just be myself as hard as I can and to hell with the haters.

And that might work. There’s a lot of wisdom in giving up trying to control results and accepting that sometimes, you have to just be yourself and live with the consequences.

And I feel like I am slowly becoming brave enough to do that. It’s not easy for me because I have spent far too long tied to the illusion of control and moving away from that requires a leap of faith and I have very little experience with those.

But knowledge only goes so far. Logic has its limits and reason provides no reason to do anything. Some leaps are clearly necessary.

But I am so very afraid of being the little bird that plummets to its death when it is shoved out of the next and fails to fly.

I guess I better work on that.

More after the break.

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The path of weakness

I feel so very weak and fragile most of the time.

And I suspect the main reason is my physical health. if I took better care of myself. Got my diabetes under control, made sure I got a bit of exercise every day, cut a lot of crappy empty carbs out of my diet, got fresh air more often.

Maybe then I would feel more robust and alive.

Ah, but that’s the real problem. I have done that in the past and what ended up happening was that despite telling myself over and over how much better I felt, a voice deep inside was screaming because everything was so much louder and more intense now and I just couldn’t fucking take it.

And so this terrible fear built up under the surface of my mind and gradually but inexorably I fell back into the old bad habits because they are what made the volume go back down to what I consider normal.

You would think I would have gotten used to the new volume level but you would be wrong. No matter how long I kept it up, that deep terror persisted.

In fact, it got worse over time instead.

So as much as I hate this terrible cold dark weak scared feeling that keeps me from getting anything substantial done, I will not be able to overcome it until I find some way to deal with the volume issue without losing my freaking mind.

Turning the volume up very, very slowly sounds good on paper but I have no idea how to implement that. Exercise a tiny bit? Put slightly more nutrition into my diet? Leave the window open for two minutes a day?

I have very little patience for tiny increments like that. I am a big picture type and such itty bitty baby steps drive me insane.

The other answer would be to go with my expansive nature and just throw open all the windows and doors of my soul and let all the sensory input in and force myself to deal with the situation all at once.

But that seems doomed to failure to me.

So I don’t know. Maybe I will ask my therapist when he comes back next Friday.

Then again, I will probably have forgotten all about this by then.

My life is really, really stupid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

..is better than none.

This is about the revolutionary idea that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

It’s been almost a year since I first read those words and they are still sinking in. The idea behind them is that if it is worth doing, you are better off doing it badly than you are not doing it at all.

It sounds so simple but it’s so huge.

The new wrinkle for me is applying it to my writing. I was watching one of those Reddit thread videos I love so much this morning and in it, someone mentions that they had started their career as a writer by winning a few writing contests, and suddenly it hit me that if what it takes to get me to submit my work to the outer world is to give myself permission to do a really sloppy and half-assed job, I should go for it.

Specifically, I was imagining reading about a writing contest and banging out an entry all in one sitting. This would get around my issue with not wanting to go back to something once I have stopped writing it as well as making an end run around feelings that my writing is not good enough or that I can’t sustain the effort needed to write something and then keep working on it till it is good enough.

Fuck all that noise. Maybe I am just not the sort of writer who rewrites. Maybe the bestI can do, at least for now, is fire off a first draft and submit it.

Hell, like I’ve said before, I have been submitting first drafts and getting away with it – in fact, getting great marks that way – for my whole life.

Maybe I am some kind of mutant breed of writer who is built for short bursts of concentrated effort that produce great results instead of being built for the marathon effort of making something as good as I can.

Who knows, maybe once I get into the habit of submitting to contests and publications in this half-assed way, I will find my ambition and that will inspire me to spend more time getting things as good as I can get them.

The point is that whatever it takes to get me to start sending my words out into the world where they might do me some good, I should do it, and maybe escape my current life just like the person from the Reddit video did.

This is huge for me. It destroys a shitload of the excuses I have been subconsciously hiding behind. That’s why I felt it necessary to write it into this blog before it could disappear back into the chaos of my mind.

Sending my precious words out into the cold dark world is still a huge step to take, but this recent epiphany has made it a whole lot smaller.

Who knows, I might write my way out of this stupid life of mine yet.

Or at least do something truly productive for once.

More after the break.

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Still haven’t made up my mind about (ick) Dragon’s Dogma.

Basically, I’ve been ignoring the question. I am having a lot of fun with my second playthrough of Divinity : Original Sin 2 and that keeps me busy enough that I don’t technically “have” to decide on Dragon’s Dogma at the moment.

But it’s there in the back of my mind and I really should resolve it one way or another. Either return the damned thing or commit to playing it long enough to get a better idea of whether I like it or not despite that meaning I can’t return it.

Returning it would be the easiest thing to do. I can’t say I have enjoyed it thus far. The best thing about it so far is its stunningly real feeling world, and that’s a pretty strong plus, but the horrible dialogue is a pretty strong minus.

The only thing keeping me from returning it is the nagging feeling that I will be missing out on something amazing by not giving it a proper chance.

Then again, it’s had almost two hours to convince me of its worth. That ls a fairly proper chance. And a properly fair chance.

A huge part of the buzz for the game is its supposedly “perfect” combat system. Problem is that I have barely had any chance to fight in the game yet, and those fights I did do were so chaotic that all I basically did was mash buttons in the right general direction and pray.

That’s a far cry from “perfect”. But that might be because I am old and my reflexes are slow and I don’t do so well in realtime combat in an unfamiliar system any more.

Maybe if I continue to play, I will adapt to it. Maybe not.

I guess I will just continue to mull it over. Ignore the voice in my head that is berating me for agonizing over such a trivial decision and insists I “should” have decided by now.

Fuck you, voice. There’s no hurry. I still have time before my window of opportunity to return it closes. I have good games to play in the meantime.

And who knows, maybe something I know I want will go on sale soon and I will return DD in order to buy it.

In other words, if I wait long enough, the decision might make itself! Or at least become a lot easier.

Relatedly (kinda), I figured out why I am doing so much better in DOS2 this time : I chose an easier difficulty level.

That wasn’t obvious because the difficulty levels don’t have numbers or any other ways to compare the difficulties, just vague descriptions.

The one I am on now is described as “fair but forgiving”. Which sounds like something I would want from a lover more than a game, but whatever.

If I want a challenge, I can always turn the difficulty up.

But right now, I am having too much fun to care.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I was never really a child.

Not since the rape, anyhow, and I was four years old when that happened. So my memories of the time before that are pretty fragmentary and while I am extremely glad that I had those golden years when I was a happy and adorable kid, I find it hard to consider that time part of my official biographical memory.

The rape changed so much.

Because once that innocence was gone, it was gone for good. The bullying I got only cemented that truth in place.

The world simply was not safe. The only time I was safe was when I was home. Out in the world, bad things could happen at any time and come from any direction.

No wonder I became agoraphobic. I was agoraphobic in elementary school. After I got bullied outside of school, the last barrier was down and I knew that the world was a hard cold dark scary place and there was absolutely nobody to protect me from it.

I was abandoned to the wolves,. which is a lot like being thrown to the wolves. but is way easier and thus more appropriate for a child who doesn’t matter and should not be here and deserved absolutely nothing ever.

I didn’t even deserve to take up space.

So anyhow. I feel like I was never really a kid. I certainly never behaved like one. All I wanted to do was read and watch TV and play video games. The idea of picking up a few toys and playing with them using my imagination would never have occurred to me.

I wanted constant mental stimulation even back then.

Lack of socialization began when I was denied kindergarten at the same time as my two friends went to school before me and then got raped.

I went to school already broken and fragile and strange. And then there was the small matter of my outrageous IQ making it hard for me to relate to other kids.

I was pretty much fucked on all levels.

And the thing about losing your innocence so young while also being painfully bright is that you now see far, far more of the world than you can safely handle.

Innocence has a purpose. I think. It’s like an immune system for the mind.

So from a very early age, I was paranoid, anxious, depressed, and bored. I had no friends and my family ignored me.

That’s not a real childhood. That’s barely a pupal stage.

And the thing is, when you don’t have a childhood, you don’t grow up. I know for a fact that on many very important levels, I am barely more than a toddler.

Social skills come to mind.

And I certainly never made it to adolescence, emotionally and socially speaking. I was too busy ignoring my instincts because I was too timid to go out into the mean old world and explore anything.

So i just filtered that confusing “illogical” stuff out of my consciousness.

And for the most part, I am still doing it. Anything that might lead to leaving my comfort zone is ruthlessly suppressed. That includes most motivation.

Instead, all I can do is hang in there and do my best to convalesce.

But it’s taking so long I will die before I am free.

And that fucking sucks.

More after the break.

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A Strange Dilemma

As I may have mentioned, I have been shopping for a new game, and today I decided to try one called Dragon’s Dogma : Dark Arisen.

First off, I fucking hate that title. It’s just so stupid. What is that supposed to evoke? Every time I read it, I hate it a little more.

And while I would never consider a game having a stupid name to be a dealbreaker, it’s a much bigger factor than you might think.

What can I say, I am a hyper verbal guy and very, very sensitive to words.

But dumb name aside, the reviews for the title are excellent, it’s a big huge open world game with tons of quests and other content and I love that, and someone I know online gave it the thumbs up as well.

So I decided to give it a try. Bought it, downloaded it, played it.

And it’s definitely got some flaws. The dialogue is atrocious, for one. Very stiff and unnatural and alienating.

And they really love the word “aught” and what they presume it means.

And to be honest, so far I find the game to be kind of clunky and awkward. And so very slow paced once you get past the “all guns blazing” intro segment where they make you fight the titular dragon twice.

After that blockbuster intro, to then have the game slow way down to a point where you are doing slow paced bucolic fetch quests and enjoying the scenery is torture.

But there is a lot to enjoy. This game feels more real than any other game I have played. The verisimilitude is astounding.

There was this one sound effect for when I jumped into the ocean that sounding so exactly right that it unleashed a whole torrent of memories from my childhood of playing in the sand at the beach and wading in the waves.

But that slow pace is killing me. Which brings me to the dilemma : it’s taking so long for the game to get started that I have already played the game for 113 minutes.

The cutoff for returning a game on Steam is two hours.

So my dilemma comes in deciding whether or not to keep the damned thing. Which means figuring out if I like it enough to want to play more.

And that’s a hard decision to make without playing a lot more, but if I do that, I will go over the two hour time limit and be stuck with it.

At the moment, I am leaning more towards keeping it. But I dunno.

Maybe I would be better off playing something else.

Or maybe I will absolutely love the game once I get used to the controls and the world and such and I would be denying myself a great experience if I didn’t tough it out.

So I am torn.

Oh well, no matter what I decided, it’s still just a freaking video game.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve talked about butterflies here before, right?

About how the truly amazing part of the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly to me is that transitional point where the caterpillar crawls into its cocoon and turns into goo.

The caterpillar is dead and gone and the butterfly does not yet exist. It’s the stage in between. And the first step of the transformation is for the caterpillar to surrender all form so that it can be born anew as a butterfly.

And that means becoming goo. Goo that knows how to become a butterfly.

Well I have been feeling fairly gooey lately. I feel like I am going through a period of transformation and that means surrendering old structures and reverting to a more primitive state in order that I might evolve into a newer, better adapted form.

It’s evolution in action, folks. You heard it here first.

So I am trying not to fight it. It would be easier if I had a nice warm cocoon to curl up in so I could sleep through the whole thing, but alas, I do not, and therefore I have to be awake and alive and trying to make it through the day while the renovations occur.

So things have been a good deal more random for me lately. Random emotions, random health, random mind states upon waking, and random sleep so intense and dream filled that when I wake up I feel like I just fell to Earth from space.

That’s how things were yesterday.

Well, whatever. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that my relative stability over the years was not just artificially created but downright maladaptive and that therefore in order to get better, I am going to have to undo a lot of those ill adaptations and that means getting sicker for a while.

Three steps forward. two steps back, twist, twirl, get dizzy, fall over, get back up and look around hoping nobody saw that.

I honestly don’t care what happens in the short term. Fuck it. Fuck it all. I am way beyond considering anything about my current configuration sacred, let alone being more important than my happiness.

Go ahead, change. Do what thou wilt. I am so far overdue for a transformational change that if I were a library book, the late fees would be enough to cripple a small nation’s economy for generations to come.

So like…. whatever. I am so very sick of this stupid little life of mine that going full goose bonkers seems like a refreshing change of pace.

Hell, I don’t even care if I end up in the psych ward any more. Might be the best thing for me. At least I would be doing something with my life.

Something visible, anyhow. I would finally be a full time loonie and expected to do A, B, and C in order to get well, and as long as I did those things, I would be okay.

Instead, I lead a directionless, pointless life where I never feel like I am doing whatever it is I am supposed to be doing and I am plagued by constant feelings of failure and incompetence and utterly incapable of facing the nightmare of infinite possibilities that stretches before me and mocks my attempts to make any kind of useful decision.

There has to be some way to face this sea of options and by opposing end them.

In fact, there’s probably a hell of a lot of way to do it.

Now I just have to pick which one…..hmmm, choices, choices…

More after the break.

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Round 2 is all new

Well maybe not ALL new.

Recently in Divinity : Original Sin 2, I decided to start over, even though I hadn’t even made it to the third chapter yet.

I was having a lot of trouble with the final battle of Chapter 2, and I couldn’t avoid the thought that I had screwed up somehow because I was nowhere near powerful enough for the fight.

Which was kind of a problem because I had fought literally every other enemy in that chapter, so there was no enemies left to fight and hence no XP yet to get.

So if I couldn’t do it then, I was pretty much fucked.

Ergo, I started over. It’s been somewhat tedious going through Chapter 2 again, but this time I am playing a custom character – an elf wizard – and my word but it is going well.

Not sure what I am doing right but I’m kicking serious amounts of ass in every fight. I’m rolling over these enemies.

It might be because at first, I was giving the “Lone Wolf” build a try. There’s an ability you can get called “Lone Wolf” which gives you massive bonuses to everything just as long as you only have one or fewer companions.

Yes, you can be a Lone Wolf and still have a partner. It’s a perfect representation of the uniquely American dilemma of wanting your hero both to be a cool rugged individualist loner while also having people to be dominant over.

After all,. the only difference between loner and loser is the letter S.

Oh, and loners prove they are not losers by having people under them. While still technically being loners because somehow, the others don’t count.

Anyhow, I was trying out the whole Lone Wolf thing and that might have let my advanced faster than normal.

Or I am just way, way better at playing a spell chucking Wizard than I am at playing a sword wielding Knight like I was before.

Come to think of it, I have done well playing damage dealing Wizards in other games too. How very interesting.

Perhaps it’s my calling.

Anyhow, that’s what is new in this absurd circus sideshow I call a life. A never-ending distraction from the fgim reality of a life that would be a lot less grim if I didn’t spend most of my time distracting myself from it.

But that’s addiction for you, isn’t it?

There’s got to be a better way for me to live.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Woke up from some very bad sleep just now.

As my poor awakenings go, this one was a doozy. Took me a long time just to get mentally organized enough to roll over. Then I had to somehow fight both mental pandemonium and the sweet song of lethargy in order to finally sit up.

I’m telling you, some days it’s barely worth gnawing through the straps.

Right now I feel disoriented (check) and dizzy (double check) as well as very, very cold all over (that’s a new one).

Hopefully food and the radical miracle of sitting upright will sort all that out.

Were I a more transcendentally inclined individual, it would not be difficult for me to convince myself that when my sleep goes bad like that, I am actually traveling to some cold dark dimension from which I routinely have to save myself at the last moment.

A dimension called Apnea. I go there when I sleep.

Because of course, that’s all it really is. I smother in my sleep. I am cold and dizzy and so on because my body was not getting enough oxygen and now I am slowly coming back to life as my circulation goes back to normal.

Just another day in the danger filled life of a big fat dude who doesn’t take care of himself nearly as well as he should.

God I hate my stupid fucking life sometimes. If I was as wise as I am smart, I would be eating healthy, using my CPAP, monitoring my blood sugar, taking insulin when needed, and getting lots of exercise.

But no. I am a depressed dumbass, and one of these days it’s going to kill me.

And so it goes.

---

I’ve gotten back into Thronebreaker : The Witcher Tales.

I remember when I first read about it. How excited I was. A Witcher CCG game?

I love both those things!! Sign me the fuck up.

And luckily, it turned out to be an extremely good game, so I played the shit out of it for quite a while, but then mothballed for three or four years.

Then yesterday, I got a sudden hankering to play it again, so I went to download it from Steam. But it wasn’t there.

Then I remembered that I bought it through gog.com. Phew! I was doubting my sanity for a bit there. I clearly remembered getting the game and playing it a lot and yet… there it was for purchase via Steam and not in my Steam Library.

Oh well. Problem solved! Played it a ton this morning. Good stuff.

The name is a little misleading though. “Thronebreaker” is actually a reference from the main Witcher plotline. It’s one of the things the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia, gets called because he killed a king once.

Don’t quote me on that,though. It’s been a while since I played through the games.

In actuality, you play a queen in Thronebreaker. And you are hardly going to break your own throne. That would just be silly.

In fact, you spend the whole game trying to restore it.

But I guess :”Throneretaker” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

More after the break.

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The Passive Cop-Out

Man, am I all about tattling on myself lately.

Remember, the truth shall set you free, but first…

Interruption: Just wanted to say that I had started blogging and Joe came in and asked if I wanted to watch stuff and I said “sure!” and got up to do it without even thinking about it and that is huge for me and I am proud of myself for it.

The passive cop-out is all about pulling back without actually overtly resisting. It happens when people get together to do something together that they don’t really want to do but also do not want to refuse to do.

So instead, they are overtly positive towards the thing but the undertone clearly conveys that they are not really enthusiastic about the thing and are looking for a way out.

And if they are the only one doing it, it doesn’t work at all. They soon sense that the vibe is not going their way and stop sending out those signals, at least for the moment.

But if there are others in the group who are also in that same position of wanting to skip the thing without looking like you are skipping the thing, they respond in kind, and also passively resist doing the thing.

Working together, two such people can resist the thing enough to kill its momentum entirely, and from there it is only a small trip to giving up on the thing entirely without anyone ever having to admit they don’t want to do it any more.

I should know. I have done this many, many times. Only now, I am owning it.

It’s a classic trick for people who have trouble sustaining enthusiasm for things because they have trouble with sustained energy for anything.

They might have depression, or other issues, but it can happen to anyone.

And it kills things. Each passive participant only has to pull back a little bit for it to work. One person pulls back a little, the next a little more, the next even more, and before you know it, the wonderful bright energetic idea is deader than disco.

And it is impossible to place blame, assuming anyone even have the energy to want to place blame. The beauty of the crime is that everybody did it. Like the murder of Julius Caesar, everybody stuck a knife into it, so who’s to say who “really” killed it.

And each individual can justify it to themselves by saying “well, I would have pushed forward instead of pulling back, but I could tell that everyone else was pulling back, and so what would have been the point?”.

And thus, nothing ever gets done. No matter how worthy and brilliant the idea is,. nobody wants to be the one who has to keep inputting energy in order to keep the thing going and therefore everyone pulls back and the thing just plain dies.

The only way to overcome this is for someone to step up and be the leader and the spark plug and the workhorse that pulls the whole thing forward even when everyone else is pulling back on the reins.

But hey, that’s perfectly doable, right? I mean, anyone could do that job. Right?

You agree? Splendid!

So nice of you to volunteer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think my mood amplitude has increased as of late.

You get the idea. Higher highs, lower lows. I’ve had moments when I felt pretty good lately, and excruciating moments of total ARGH where I felt like I wanted to jump up and scream bloody murder then run cackling into the night.

I hate those.

Overall, I feel like something inside me is struggling to be born, and these oscillations are a result of it thrashing back and forth as it tries to free itself and escape.

Whatever. I will relax and let it do as it will inasmuch as that is possible. I know that no matter what happens, I will be better off for it, so I am willing to sacrifice a certain amount of peace of mind for the cause.

It’s not like my usual state of unnatural calm does me a lot of good anyhow.

Might be fun to be less sane for a while. It would certainly keep things from being too predictable. Life in my cage can be terribly dull, especially for my body, which hardly ever gets to do anything fun.

I can’t even masturbate all that often.

So long live the new flesh, I suppose. Anything that blasts open the calcified veins and arteries between my life force and my frostbitten soul is fine by me.

It’s high time I stop keeping my hot side hot and my cool side cool. I need to rip down the wall between them and let them mingle till I am warm through and through.

It will be worth all the hissing steam and cracing ice if when it is all over, I feel alive.

For a change.

---

The Daily Affliction

I’ve been trying to move to a more energy friendly kind of mindset that views a surge in my overall energy levels as a good thing and not just something that causes pain as it tried to force a seized engine to turn over.

But these things happen in steps, sometimes quite small ones, and so my step in that direction is to view my energy as a kind of daily affliction that I have to exercise and move around to excise before I can truly relax and be lazy like usual.

It’s kind of perverse, but I think it will work. So far, it’s just a reconceptualization of existing forces, but I will implement it soon.

It’s much easier to convince myself to exercise a little if I focus on the end goal of relaxation and reduced anxiety as opposed to trying to focus on some long term goal like losing weight or being healthier in general.

I think the whole healthier lifestyle industry would be better off if it concentrated on the most immediate and noticeable benefits first.

Human beings need to have their immediate needs met before they can start to think about their long term needs.

The hierarchy is very strict. That’s why so many attempts at lifestyle improvement fail.

You will “cheat” on your diet every time unless you get those needs met some other way. You have to convince your body that you are not starving.

More after the break.

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Crunch time! 467 words in half an hour.

No frigging problem.

I am still shopping around for my next serious game. I bought one of those game packs recently but there’s no solid winners in there.

Heck, two of them I already had and two of them were fantasy war games, so that left only four games that were even in the running to be my Next Big Thin(tm).

And what the heck, I am still enjoying Divinity : Original Sin 2. It really says something about a game that I am enjoying my second playthrough almost as much as I did the first one. There’s just so much to experience.

Heck, I haven’t even felt the need to get into modding the dang thing yet. Everything I wanted from mods comes with the game.

Yes, you read that right – this game is so awesome it comes with its own mods. I particularly like the one that frees me from the tyranny of resurrection scrolls. Now using a bedroll, besides healing everyone up, also resurrects any dead character.

Thus, the game is effectively put in line with other isometric RPGs in that as long as one of your characters is alive at the end of the fight, you win, without long term consequences like running out of resurrection scrolls and being stuck with a dead character until you get one.

And they are really, really expensive.

Sorry game, but I am nowhere near that hardcore.

I also picked up a game from way back in 2000 called The Operative : No One Lives Forever. It’s basically a James Bond FPS, like Goldeneye for the N64, but instead of the famous 007, you are fledgling superspy Cate Archer.

Plus it’s all done in a very 60’s style, so it’s more like 007 meets Austin Powers. It has a lot of style, wit, and fun, and (sadly) a wee bit of racism.

All those guys in fezzes with Apu accents saying things like “I do not like the bullets!” is so very not cool any more.

What a difference 20 years makes.

The best part is that I didn’t have to pay for it. It is “abandonware”, meaning the game developer either no longer exists or no longer supports it, so there is no way to play for the game even if I wanted to, and that means I can download it guilt free.

And yet, there it was with a 91 percent score on Metacritic. How could I resist?

So really, there’s no great galloping rush to get a new game. I can take my time looking around for a worth successor to DOS2.

I am in the mood for something open world 3D, like Witcher 3, Fallout 4, or Skyrim.

But not Skyrim. I really don’t want to fall down that rabbit hole again.

Still, imagine all the fun new perverted things people have made for it since the last time I played it….

No! I will be strong. I will resist the urge to re-install Skyrim.

Besides, if I want perverted fun, there’s always Sims 4.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Have you ever wondered what makes someone into a pathological liar?

I have. They have always fascinated me, despite being a pretty honest myself. Something about them resonates with me.

And I think the main lure of the liar’s life is that special liar’s high human beings get when they feel like they are getting away with something.

This liar’s high is well established and documented, and it is presumably this high that is the pathological liar’s primary addiction.

They pursue it with such heedless abandon that they will continue to lie even when their lies are obvious and not fooling anybody.

I think there’s more to it than that, though. I think that for some people, lying gives them a feeling of control and power. After all, while reality might be fixed and unforgiving, the negotiated reality we create via communication is not, and one of the dirtiest tricks the human mind can play on itself is to edit one’s personal reality by convincing people of a version of reality that you prefer and then believing it yourself based on their belief.

A certain kind of person – one with quite a bit wrong with them, sadly – finds that kind of power irresistible, and falls into the pathological liar trap.

Sadly, it is an affliction that is very hard to cure as the patient generally does not truly believe there to be a problem.

And of course, these people can do enormous amounts of social damage with their lies. Hearts broken, people betrayed, trust abused, and so on.

I wonder what the effect on their long term mental health might be? After all. it seems to me that they themselves would lose track of what is real and what is illusion, and that can’t be good for mental stability.

Anyhow, I bring this subject up because I have significant powers of illusion myself. I just don’t use them to try to fool people into believing lies.

Instead, I use them as a writer does. A writer is, after all, a professional liar. If I write “Bob was an accountant who loved scuba diving”. I know that there is no Bob the accountant who loved scuba diving. I just made him up. He is, in that sense, a lie.

But of course, fiction has certain signifiers that tell the reader that what they are reading is not a record of true events, but that special brand of lying known as fiction. So nobody is actually fooled, nor am I trying to fool them.

This gives me unlimited power within the imaginary world of my story. Like I have said before, in the world of my storytelling, I have more power than God, because even God is just another fictional character in my writing and does whatever I tell Him to do.

God finally gets sick of Trump’s bullshit and makes him go on live international television and curse out the NRA, the Constitution, Christianity, and everyone dumb enough to vote for him before violently soiling himself while openly masturbating and shouting “FUCK THE USA!”. 

See? Piece of Cake.

My imagination scares me sometimes.

More after the break.

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Back from the Twilight Zone

Laid down for a nap at around 4 PM. Usually, my naps are like two hours tops. This time, I woke up at 7:45 pm extremely disoriented and confused, even by my standards.

It then takes me around 15 minutes to even get it together enough to get out of bed. It’s like there is a vast shadow in my mind that makes it very hard to think straight (ha) or do anything linearly, like say, ordering my weekly meal.

Was going to get Indian food from Tandoori King Cafe but got sticker shock at the price ($36!) so now I have ordered far more food from a Greek place called Opa! for only $25, which is a way better deal.

So now the food is on its way and here I am, tapping the heys like I know what I am doing when I am still highly disoriented and part of me just wants to crawl back under the covers and hibernate.

Luckily, I have my hunger to keep me on track.

Still, the shit is getting so very old. I am so damned tired of sleep being such a weird thing for me. I can’t even imagine eight hours of sleep in a row any more.

I mean, I know it happens to billions of people overnight, but any attempt to relate such a bizarre idea to myself results in every mental error in the book.

Brain crashed. Please reset your mind.

---

Hmmm. Seems like my delivery person (deliverer?) is having trouble because the website says they are here but so far no food and it’s been ten minutes.

Frustratingly, the phone rang exactly once but when I picked it up, dial tone.

I want my frigging food, dude!

Preferably before I end up spontaneously falling asleep.

---

Well this fuckin’ sucks.

At 9 pm, I contacted Skip the Dishes via text chat and according to their records, the courier got here but then couldn’t get me on the phone so the order was canceled.

Canceled? But I’m still hungry, motherfucker!

Well I was way too hungry to go make a new order then wait for it to arrive, so I am eating a normal, boring, non-restaurant meal and seething with resentment.

I mean, what the fuck, right? I have gotten hundreds of orders via this phone and this phone number, yet this numbnuts can’t get me on the phone?

Argh. Oh well, at least I saved $25 this way. But I was really looking forward to my little Greek feast. I hardly ever have Greek, but when I do, I enjoy it.

---

Well shit. I am late. Apparently, I was 45 words away from being done when my mind wandered and forgot to return.

Oh well. Missing the midnight deadline by only 45 words when I have hit it 99 percent of the time is no big deal, I suppose.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty cranky right now.

Woke up with a headache and that’s put me in a grumpy mood. My head hurts and that makes everything else hurt as well. I have the urge to lash out at the world that is causing me all this pain.

And the thing is, I know this. Which is what makes me such a weirdo. I am pretty sure that a normal person would just be cranky in this fix I am in. They would be surly and difficult to get along with until he pain passed.

And sure, it would be easy for me to look down on such people as being irresponsible and childish compared to a paragon of self-control and restraint like myself.

But those people would vent their emotion of the moment whereas I just let it build up inside me and add to the backlog choking the bloody life out of me, so who is really coming out ahead?

Maybe I would be far better off in the long run if I just let loose. But I can’t do that.

What if it makes people not like me any more? Then they would go away and I would be abandoned and alone and we all know that is worse than death.

No, I have to be super nice and sweet and fun and funny at all times so that people will like me enough to stick around despite how awful I really am.

Got to work hard to keep everyone fooled, including myself.

So in no way am I allowed to be merely human. That’s for other people. I have to be something spectacular and amazing all the time, while also being pathetic and therefore appealing to potential caretakers.

It’s a fine line to tightrope across.

And true, it means I have no idea who I really am. Who I would be if I could just relax all my safeguards and just be myself.

That would mean acting on emotion like, most of the time, and who knows what would happen then? And as we all know, the unpredictable and the horrible are almost the same thing. Only the controlled and therefore predictable can be trusted. Everything else is chaos and madness and a giant invitation for the world to fuck me over.

I mean, that’s just common sense. Everyone operates on the assumption that the entire universe will fuck them over any chance it gets, right?

I honestly can’t imagine being any other way. In theory, I suppose, I can posit the possibility of a version of me that feels safe, but I can’t imagine truly believing in it.

Not without my being a hell of a lot richer, anyhow. Amazing how that works. The more money I have, the more relaxed and safe I feel, as if the money was insulation against the cold hard winds of harsh reality.

I’ve always understood what made Scrooge hoard money. He was trying to shut out the world he thought of as harsh and unfair.

Problem is, the real problem is a lack of self-esteem and emotional stability. It’s not the real world that is harch and cruel, it’s one’s emotional landscape.

The call is coming from inside the house, dude.

More after the break.

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On loose energy

Still feeling kind of irritable. Not as much as before, but still. And it’s got me thinking about why this happens to me.

I think that at some point, my body drew on its reserves of energy in order to face the day, but it withdrew more than my sedentary lifestyle could hope to drain.

So I have this excess energy rattling around in my bloodstream, looking for an outlet. And until it finds it, I am going to feel tense and nervous and like I want to pounce on something and subdue it.

The obvious solution would be to find something non-sedentary to do that would dissipate that energy so I can freaking relax.

And I am not saying that there is anything wrong with that solution, but at this moment, my issues and my depression make that impossible.

But I am closer than I have ever been before to being able to do that kind of thing. I have been drilling a tunnel to my energy supplies for a long time now and I feel like I am only a few feet away right now.

There’s just a bit more of that icy cold fear of change and things uncontrolled and therefore unpredictable left to go before I can finally believe what I know to be true :

That getting some exercise into my life will not only make me healthier in the long run, it will reduce my tension levels immediately.

I even experimented with this by doing 25 of my weird vertical push-ups on the way back from a water refill trip and I am pretty sure I actually felt my tension level drain.

So even if all I did was add that to my various trips to the kitchen or the bathroom, I would probably do myself a hell of a lot of good.

And the great thing is, the benefit is immediate. Exercising in that way makes me feel better. It is inherently rewarding.

I think this explains why I feel so much better after I have been out and about sometimes too. It’s not just that I have been getting some fresh air for a change – although that’s a big deal too.

It’s that the increased energy drain has allowed me to relax some, and now everything is pumping and circulating and refreshing itself.

Suddenly I get why people talk about feeling better after having gone for a walk or a jog or a ride on the ol’ bicycle.

The trick, I think, is to stop seeing life the depressive way, where you are always trying to make the most of a very small supply of energy, and instead see each day as coming with a certain amount of energy you have to spend if you want to relax and enjoy life.

Break the siege mentality, basically, and realize that not using your energy does not stockpile it for a rainy day.

It just makes you tense and miserable.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.