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.